
Class _ZE^ 

Copiglit}!? 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



/ 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



r 



i 



BY 



W. C. PRIME, LL.D. 

AUTHOR OF "I GO A-FISHING " ETC. 




( NOV g 1892 

NEW YORK ~ :/ " " 

HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 
1892 



Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 

All rights reserved. 



O^^ 



TO 

MY FRIEND 

WILLIAM F. BRIDGE 



PREFACE 



PROBABLY no one ever made a book for the reason 
^ which induces the making of this. The papers here 
gathered were written, as letters, to a daily newspaper, 
the New York Journal of Commerce, in the course of a cor- 
respondence which has extended over more than forty 
years. Although often asked to gather them in a book, 
my judgment has been that such letters, however read- 
able or unreadable when occasionally appearing in one's 
morning newspaper, are not good material for continuous 
reading in a solid book. They were written for the pur- 
pose of a day, served their purpose, disappeared, and 1 
had no wish to recall them. But they had been cut out 
and preserved by more than one person, strangers to me, 
who have severally written me that if I do not make a 
book of them they will ! Should such a book be made 
by another person, it would perpetuate many sad errors 
of type, such as occur in rapid newspaper work, and be 
a misfortune to the papers and to me. There was but 
one way to protect the dead and long-buried sketches— 
namely, to select some of them, revise, correct, and edit 
them, and make a book, which 1 have done only because 
1 did not want it made. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS I 

II. IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 17 

III. A VILLAGE DISCUSSION 34 

IV. UPHILL IN FOG 41 

V, SWEET-SCENTED FERN 45 

VI. AN angler's AUGUST DAY 54 

VII. VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 63 

VIII. HIGHLANDS OF WESTERN NEW HAMPSHIRE . 70 

IX. THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 77 

X. A DEAD LETTER 85 

XI. EPITAPHS AND NAMES 97 

XII. FINDING NEW COUNTRY . . I24 

XIII. BOYS WITH STAND-UP COLLARS I36 

XIV. PILGRIMAGE ENDED 143 

XV. NON-RESISTANCE 152 

XVI. SONGS OF THE AGES 160 

XVII. IGNOTUS 167 

XVIII. SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY 175 

XIX. A WINTER night's ERRAND 183 

XX. HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL IQO 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



The carriage was standing at the door, and I 
had finished my morning inspection of horses, 
harness, bolts, and gearing. We were on one of 
our favorite journeys, wandering over the hills and 
through the valleys of New Hampshire and Ver- 
mont. We had driven already two or three hun- 
dred miles, seeking only that which we found daily, 
scenery, sunshine, birds, flowers, whatever of nat- 
ure and whatever of humanity might be seen as 
we wandered along New England roads. 

A gentleman who was standing in the hotel door- 
way said • "I am told you travel a great deal with 
horses and carriage. It puzzles me to know what 
pleasure you find in it. I have travelled in that 
way in Europe, but I don't understand what at- 
tractions you find in New England." 

He expressed the idea which is in many minds. 
I could not afford to waste the morning in recount- 
ing to him the delights of carriage journeying. I 
gave him but a brief summary of these, told him 



2 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

there was no country in the world which was so 
charming to the traveller as this country, nor one 
in which scenery was more varied and beautiful, 
nor one in which country inns were so good, country 
people so hospitable, and finished by saying: "Try 
it for yourself, and if you don't enjuy it don't do it 
again." 

The road was in that charming country which 
lies south of the White Mountain range. We had 
followed the Pemigewasset River from its source 
in Profile Lake, under the Old Man of the Mount- 
ain, day after day, until we had left it at Franklin 
Falls, and were now following our varying whims 
from valley to valley, over highlands and hills, 
through the very heart of the Granite State. 

It was in May. The forests farther north had 
been just tinged with that delicious mauve color 
which is caused by the swelling buds of the ma- 
ples, and which from day to day changes into pink 
and hazy sky blue and at length, when the buds 
burst, into green. But here the green had won the 
day, and the view in all directions, as I drove 
along, was fresh and full of promise. When the 
road led through forest both sides were luxuriant 
with the close -packed masses of ferns just com- 
mencing summer life, and in the woods were hosts 
of purple and striped blossoms of the trilium, the 
glory of our northern forests in the early season. 
I came out from a piece of woods on a plain where 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 3 

the road went straight ahead in full view for a 
half-mile. Nearly that distance ahead stood a 
farm-house, with its barns and out-buildnigs. The 
house stood back from the road among fruit-trees, 
some of which were in blossom. But what espe- 
cially attracted attention was a large number of 
horses and wagons, vehicles of various descriptions, 
which made the front yard and the road near the 
house look black. 

Only two events in the country life are likely to 
cause such a gathering around a house. When 
you see it you are quite safe in thinking that there 
is a funeral or an auction sale. Either is sure to 
bring together all the wagons of a very wide-spread 
population. There is this difference, however, that 
to the funeral men and women and children come, 
but to the "vandue" only men. 

As I approached the house I began to pass 
horses tied to fences and small trees. Everything 
in the shape of a hitching- post, everything to 
which a halter could be tied, was in use, and when 
I reached the front gate there were groups of men 
so occupied here and there that no doubt could 
exist that this was an auction sale. It v/as un- 
doubtedly a funeral in one sense, not of any one 
dead, but of a home. It was the extinguishment 
of a fire that had been burning on a hearth a great 
many years. It took but a little while to learn 
from those who were grouped near the gate the rea- 



4 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

sons for the auction. This group consisted of men 
who had come only because it was an occasion for 
meeting people, a chance for general talk and ex- 
change of little news, a break in the monotony 
of country life. Near the barn was another group, 
inspecting cows. They had no interest in the sale 
of furniture in the house. On the front lawn was 
another group. I fancied they were discussing the 
value of the farm, whether it was worth the mort- 
gage on it, whether any one was likely to bid on 
it. As I walked in towards the door I saw that 
there were people in all parts of the house, most 
of them in the large kitchen whence the voice of 
the auctioneer was audible. As I entered he was 
selling cooking utensils, getting from a cent to six 
cents apiece, rarely as much as ten cents for any 
article. 

I confess that, as I looked around this kitchen 
on this scene, I felt very much as if it were a fu- 
neral, and began to think that I had an interest in, 
a personal acquaintance with the departed. It 
had been for a long lifetime the home of an honest, 
respected farmer, who had recently died ; an old 
man whose work was ended. His children, all but 
one daughter, had gone to distant parts of the 
country. His wife had died a year before. The 
property must be sold to settle his small estate, 
pay his funeral expenses and perhaps other claims. 
There was to be also an attempt to find a pur- 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 5 

chaser for the farm, but it was thought the holder 
of a mortgage on it would be the only possible 
bidder. 

That life was to be closed out forever. Where- 
in much of it had consisted was here visible. It 
was displayed for public view, and any stranger was 
free to rove from room to room and see the record, 
for nothing was reserved; not even the clothing, 
or the old man's silver watch, or his wife's work- 
basket with knitting needles and scissors, and a 
knife with a broken blade, and a ball of blue yarn 
and a half-knit woollen stocking. 

Here was a summing up of the total reward in 
this world's valuables which a long, laborious life 
had earned. I can never cease to feel indignation 
at the preachers about labor and its rewards who 
imagine that workmen in the trades are the only 
laborers to be considered; who are deceived by 
the idea that the various societies of " working- 
men " represent one- tenth of the hard-working 
men of our country ; who imagine that the labor 
question relates only to that small number of per- 
sons who work for fixed pay, eight or ten hours a 
day. 

The life of this man from his childhood had been 
one of incessant labor, hard work, beginning daily 
long before daylight, ending so wearily after dark 
that he welcomed sleep as the only rest he knew. 
Your ten -hour city laborer does not know what 



6 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

work means, and never will know till he acquires a 
farm and has to support life by digging for himself, 
paying himself for his work, and finding that to 
the vast body of American farmers fourteen hours 
a day labor earns bare subsistence. 

The life labor in this house and on this farm 
showed in the end, as the laborer's pay when all 
work was done, just nothing beyond the bare sup- 
port of the life. Less, indeed, than that, for there 
was a mortgage on the farm, which represented a 
demand of some pressing need, or a steady, slow 
falling behind from year to year 

The home furniture was not luxurious , far oth- 
erwise. But it was not altogether without interest. 
There was an old chest of drawers in one room 
which probably belonged to the mother, possibly 
came from her mother when she was married. It 
was made of solid cherry-wood, and the old brass 
mountings were, for a wonder, brilliant as if new. 
There was a small looking-glass hanging on a wall, 
in a frame once of great beauty, the relief orna- 
ments on it being ears of golden grain. 'Jliere 
were some pictures in black-pine frames, without 
glass. None had any money value, but each had 
higher than money value, because they had been 
the delights of that family life. Children had 
grown up looking at them daily, their young imag- 
inations wandering far away under the guiding in- 
fluence of art. Mark you, my friend, art brings its 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 7 

blessings not alone by the power of renowned art- 
ists, b}^ the works of great masters. There are very 
rude pictures, pictures which provoke the derision 
of ignorant critics, pictures which have had mighty 
influence in swaying human minds. There was a 
fifteenth -century artist in Cologne whose Bible 
pictures in rough hard outlines were the educators 
of millions of people for a century and more after 
he was dead. It is the thought written in the pict- 
ure which is its power, not the execution, which is 
of account to very few who see it. There is no 
possible doubt that that old painted print of Ruth 
gleaning, and that other of the raising of the wid- 
ow's son of Nain, had impressed lessons on young 
minds not to be effaced in this world's experiences, 
perhaps not in any other world. 

The old kitchen seemed to be the place wherein 
the life had left its strongest marks And yet they 
were not many. There was a little printed calen- 
dar of a year long ago pasted on the side of the 
chimney. There was a clock (not worth your pur- 
chasing, my friend) standing high up on a wooden 
shelf. There was a dresser whereon the family 
crockery was piled for sale. Having in mind 
friends who want old crockery, I looked over the 
pieces, one by one, but found nothing worth a 
stranger's purchasing, except, perhaps, one English 
plate with a blue print, the rich dark blue wherein 
the cheap Staffordshire wares surpassed all other, 



8 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

Oriental or Occidental, potteries or porcelains. But 
the table was there, a very old square table, made 
of black-ash, with four solid legs. It had no claim 
to notice for any beauty about it. But around it 
the family had been gathered morning, noon, and 
evening. First the young man and his young wife 
had sat there alone, happy, hopeful. Years had 
fulfilled all they had hoped for, had brought little 
heads to the sides of the table, and years had 
changed them into older and perhaps wiser heads. 
All the troubles and all the happiness of every one 
of them had been brought to the assemblies at that 
kitchen table. Christmases, Thanksgiving days, 
wedding-days of daughters, days when the minister 
was to made his annual visit, all the gala-days of 
life had loaded the table with unusual feasts. And 
always, with unfailing humility and gratitude, the 
voice of the father had been heard at the head of 
the board thanking God as sincerely as if the farm 
had been a gold-mine instead of slow -yielding 
soil. 

I was in the house but a few minutes. As I 
drove rapidly down the road I overtook a man, 
going home from the sale. I am not fond of " buy- 
ing bargains " in such cases. If there had been 
anything to tempt me I could not comfortably own 
a purchase out of that household at the poor prices 
things were bringing. But this man was carrying 
home something. As I turned out and drove by 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 9 

him he held it up for me to see. We went along 
side by side. 

" What have you got there ?" 

" I don't know. I think it's an old pitcher they 
used in a church." 

''What did you buy it for?" 

" I don't know. I s'pose I can sell it to some 
one." 

" How much do you want for it ?" 

" I don't know what it's worth." 

"Well, speak quick, if you want to sell," and my 
horses were pulling ahead hard. 

" I don't know as I care to sell it." 

"All right," and I went ahead rapidly. 

" Will you give two dollars .''" came in a shout 
after me. 

" Will you take it ?" 

"Yes." 

He came up alongside of me and I took my pur- 
chase. It was never church property ; quite other- 
wise. It was a fine, tall, old two-quart pewter mug 
with cover. It had done duty in times when men 
sat together while the pewter, filled with foaming 
beer, went around from hand to hand and lip to 
lip. It was in perfect order, but there was nothing 
about it which seemed in keeping with the old 
farm-house. When, four miles on, I stopped to 
feed my horses, the landlord, looking in my car- 
riage, exclaimed, " Hello, did you buy Jake's pewter 



10 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

pitcher ?" and then said Jake had bought it at an- 
other sale years ago, on specuhition, and had car- 
ried it afterwards to every " vandue," trying to find 
(I purchaser. 

In the autumn of that year I drove again through 
the same country, sometimes on the same, mostly 
on other roads. The aspect of the hills and val- 
leys was now very different. October is a golden 
month for carriage travel, on some accounts more 
pleasant than any other month in the year, both 
for horses and travellers. 

The road passed through a forest, unbroken for 
half a mile. On the right a stream wandered over 
rocks, and under little bluffs of moss, bright green 
miniature copies of mountain bluffs along the 
courses of mighty rivers. Now and then, where 
the stream fell into a pool, the lower end of the 
pool was dammed with autumn leaves, yellow and 
red and brown, and in the whirl of the pool you 
could see the same colored leaves going around 
and around, and the water looked as if it were 
clearer and colder for their presence. The road 
was covered over with leaves, a yellow carpet, and 
every few minutes the light breeze would freshen 
up a little and shake the higher branches of the 
trees, and send down a shower of leaves, which 
flitted and darted to and fro, flashing in the sun- 
shine, and falling on our laps and all around us. 

At length the road, which going up a gentle as- 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS II 

cent left the brook away in the woods, emerged 
into open country, and we found ourselves on the 
top of a hill. Before us spread one of those beau- 
tiful landscapes in which New England is richer 
than any other part of the world that I know of. 
The road descended into an oval basin, some three 
miles long and a mile broad, the bottom and sides 
of which were, or had been, cultivated farm lands, 
except where a small lake slept motionless. It was 
surrounded by low hills, up the sides of which the 
fields extended, here and there one of them glow- 
in": with the buff and Sfold of corn stubble and 
scattered pumpkins. Along the ridges, where the 
fields did not go over them, were groves of maple 
and birch whose autumn colors were intensely 
bright, while down the slopes lay many abandoned 
fields gone to brush, mauve, maroon, crimson, and 
purple-colored with their dense growth of bushes, 
scarlet-lined along the fences by rows of sumac. 

If you can show me anywhere in the world land- 
scapes which are as rich and varied in color as our 
northern landscapes in America, or which are more 
beautiful in the form and contrast of valley and 
hill, I will go far with you to see them. Autumnal 
foliage with many is thought to be the changed 
color of the forest leaves, and few have observed 
the wonderful painting of landscapes in the autum- 
nal colors of the low bushes. Many of our New 
England rivers in October flow between banks 



12 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

and around low gravel islands which are un- 
broken masses of crimson from a plant not a 
foot high, covering every inch for acres. And 
the shades are even more beautiful than the in- 
tense colors, soft, rich, and delicate as old em- 
broideries. 

There was no village in the valley. As I drove 
along the road which led nearly through the mid- 
dle of it I came, at a cross-road, to a graveyard 
and an old church. That it was once a church the 
remains of a tower or spire indicated, and its lo- 
cation, a hundred feet from both roads, in the 
graveyard, demonstrated. There had never been 
any fence around the lot except the rough -laid 
loose stone-wall which serves for fence in all parts 
of our country where stone is plenty. And no 
better or more picturesque fencing can be, espe- 
cially if people will plant along such walls any of 
the many beautiful vines which abound everywhere, 
and thrive luxuriantly in just such places. But no 
vines had ever been planted here. Not a solitary 
bush or tree grew in the graveyard. Even grass 
seemed to have run out from lonesomeness and 
neglect, so that the ground looked like an old 
worn-out pasture lot, the only break in the desolate 
aspect being a stunted sprig of golden-rod which 
gleamed in front of the church door. 

I passed it, careful not to tread on it, and tried 
the door, found it open, and went in. The interior 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 13 

was a sad ruin, through which the breeze was free 
to blow, for there was no glass in any window, nor, 
indeed, now any need of glass, since it was plain 
enough that there had not been for long time any 
assembling of people here to worship. The pul- 
pit, nearly round and high up, backed by a large 
window, had once been reached by a winding stair- 
way, now broken down. The pews, which were 
built of pine, without paint, were in fair preserva- 
tion. The plaster on the walls and flat ceiling had 
mostly fallen off, and lay in the pews and on the 
floor of the aisles. I could see the blue sky 
through one great rift overhead where the roof 
timber had fallen in and crushed down the ceil- 
ing. 

No places are filled with such profound interest 
to thoughtful men as those spots in which their 
fellow-men of former generations were accustomed 
to assemble for the worship of God. And places 
of Christian worship are more deeply interesting 
because of the characteristics of that worship 
which distinguish it from all others. In no other 
have men approached Deity with the sense of per- 
sonal unworthiness which only their God can re- 
move, and with faith in His fatherhood and broth- 
erhood. His personal presence among them, and 
His love for them. From the early ages of the 
Christian Church this immediate and close rela- 
tionship between God and man has been a distin- 



14 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

guishing characteristic of old Christian art, whose 
earliest representations of His personality are as 
the Good Shepherd, carrying home a lost and 
found lamb of His flock. If that faith which di- 
rects their prayers be indeed the substance of the 
things hoped for, then the place where men meet 
their God is so truly the House of God that one is 
a-t a loss to understand those who deny any special 
sanctity in it. But however irreverent be their re- 
gard for the church which they themselves fre- 
quent, I think there are very few who can without 
some serious emotion enter an old church in which 
generations of men and women and children have 
worshipped, who are now lying in silent graves 
around it. 

I don't think you, my friend, whatever your creed 
or your sympathies, could have sat with me in one 
of those plain pine pews, seeing the sunshine of 
that autumn falling through the shattered building 
on the ruined interior, and have failed to appreci- 
ate something of the sanctity of the old place of 
prayer. It was nearly noon. Through the broken 
roof one broad stream of golden light fell on the 
open place between the front pew and the pulpit. 
There the table used to stand which they called 
their Lord's table, and from which they received, 
as their catechism expressed it, "by faith," that is, 
by the highest assurance men can have, unhesitat- 
ing belief, the body and blood of Him they wor- 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 1 5 

shipped. There, one by one, when the work and 
worry, the sorrow and sin of this Ufe were ended, 
they were laid with closed eyes and calm faces, 
and thence carried out to the gathering place of 
the dead. Where are they now, strong men and 
matrons, young men and maidens, little children 
and patriarchs ? As I asked myself the question 
I walked across the floor to a window and looked 
out. Yes, they were all lying there, as so many 
millions of the Christian dead all over the world 
lie, in circles that sweep over the surface of the 
globe, ever-widening circles as their faith has ex- 
tended among men, all with their faces heavenward 
and their feet towards Jerusalem. 

We spent more than a half-hour in the old church. 
I climbed by the wrecked stairway into the pulpit. 
Its interior casing was falling to pieces, and in a 
recess within were some scraps of paper, which had 
slipped between the boards from the shelf under 
the desk. On one was a memorandum of the min- 
ister for notices to be given of the weekly prayer 

meeting at Mr. 's house, and a Thursday night 

lecture at the school-house on the mountain. On 
another was a funeral notice. There was nothing 
else legible, except a torn scrap, the lower part of a 
leaf of a hymn-book, and on this was a stanza not 
unfitting the associations of the place. So for the 
moment I assumed the position of the erstwhile 
minister and said, from the pulpit, " Let us sing :" 



1 6 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

"Oh what amazing joys they feel 
While to their golden harps they sing, 
And sit on every heavenly hill 
And spread the triumphs of their King !" 

There were only three of us, but one was leader 
of a choir in an up-country church ; and we sang a 
good old tune, which, perhaps, they who were now 
silent around the church used to sing to the same 
words — and perhaps will some day sing again. 

And while we were singing I saw a vision ; not 
supernatural, but as lovely for the moment as any 
imagination. In the open doorway at the other 
end of the church was standing a little child, a girl 
of five years old, dressed in white, with masses of 
red-gold hair which the wind, coming in from be- 
hind her, was waving and shaking. Her great blue 
eyes were looking with wonderment while she lis- 
tened. As the sound ceased she vanished. We 
might have thought it an apparition, but that, going 
to the door, we saw her running down the road as 
fast as her little feet would carry her, towards a 
large farm-house, nearly a half-mile off. Her story 
told at the house might have been the foundation 
of a mid-day ghost story for the neighborhood, the 
coming back of old-time people to sing an old hymn 
in the ruined church. But they could hardly sup- 
pose that ghosts would come in a travelling car- 
riage drawn by a very solid pair of gray horses. 



IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 1 7 



II 

IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 

It matters little which way you drive in Vermont 
to seek beautiful scenery. Every road furnishes it. 
The question each morning, which way we shall go, 
is not a very serious one. Ordinarily we ask about 
the roads in all directions, but not for the sake of 
getting information. That is hopeless. Few now 
have knowledge of a road to any place except the 
nearest railway station. At the station no one 
knows a road more than two or three miles away. 
This is not exaggeration. It is simply the result 
of the abandonment of carriage travel and the uni- 
versal use of the rail. Intercommunication between 
outlying farms and villages is nearly at an end. 
The old social intercourse and mutual dependence 
of the country folk is mostly gone. The fathers 
and mothers knew every family within a circuit of 
ten or twenty miles. There are not so many fami- 
lies in the circuit now, but many have ceased, in 
this generation, to be even acquaintances one with 
another. 

Night after night, sitting by the fire in the tavern 



15 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

public-room, with ten or fifteen of the neighbors 
gathered for the evening talk, we have inquired 
about adjoining towns and roads thither, whether 
there are inns, whether the roads cross mountains, 
whether there are streams, ponds, lakes, which way 
and whither the watercourses run, but all in vain. 
And at the same time these men discuss with ample 
intelligence the Irish land question, the position of 
the French in Africa, the last news from Ethiopian 
explorers, and the politics of the United States. 
We seldom hear home politics talked about. 

From all this you may infer that a ride through 
Vermont and New Hampshire is a journey of dis- 
covery. We go by inquiring almost from mile to 
mile. A good map, already marked over and over 
with the lines of our old routes, lies on the carriage 
seat. We start like a ship and lay our course by 
compass, or rather by the sun, for some place which 
on the scale seems to be at a reasonable distance, 
and ask from time to time whether we are on the 
right road. Occasionally we go wrong. It is of 
no account. We keep on, and arrive somewhere. 

In the spring a trout rod lies ready for use in 
the carriage. In the autumn, a heavier rod and a 
gun. Here and there along the road are tempting 
spots for the angler, and I stop the horses awhile. 
In the forest roads, covered with fallen leaves and 
nuts in autumn, partridges are often to be seen, 
sometimes to be shot. Always the scenery is at- 



IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 19 

tractive. Comparisons of scenery are usually ab- 
surd. No two landscapes possess all of the same 
characteristics. One lake is unlike another, and it 
is impossible to compare one with another, except 
when the characteristics are so diverse that it may 
be fairly said of one or the other that it possesses 
little or no beauty. Mountains have their peculi- 
arities, and one can seldom be intelligently placed 
in comparison with another as to the general quality 
of its scenery. One is bolder, grander, another is 
richer in lofty masses of color, and another has 
wonderful outlines of form against the sky. But, 
with some experience, I know no country which, as 
you drive through it, presents more variety of 
beauty, more rapid changes in the character of the 
beauty, more alternations of grandeur and pastoral 
calmness, more wild ravines, and more far -distant 
views, than Northern New England. 

Proposing a wandering drive along the Green 
Mountains, I sent my horses to Brattleboro' as a 
starting-point. While waiting there for a friend I 
drove in various directions around the town. One 
could pass a month in Brattleboro' and drive every 
day a new road, and a good road, every rod of 
which is beautiful, whether in Vermont or across 
the river in New Hampshire. Streams pour down 
a dozen valleys between high hills, some cultivated 
to the summits, some forest-covered. Wild-flowers 
were out that spring in an abundance that seemed 



20 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

to surpass all former springs. The forests along 
the road- sides were luxuriant with thousands of 
flowers of a hundred varieties. The lateness of 
the spring had kept back the usual growth of early 
May, and the sudden coming of a succession of 
warm days had brought out the later and the earlier 
flora together. A mile out of the village there was 
a spot which was superb. Masses of violets grew 
as thick as pansies in garden beds, the large tall 
w^hite and pale pink in clumps with the equally tall 
and large yellow, the small white and small yellow, 
and two varieties of blue, all intermingling and 
covering the ground at the edge of the forest, 
formed a continuous bed of color stretching a hun- 
dred rods with scarcely a break. Trilium, purple 
and painted, nodded over this bed in the deeper 
shadow of the woods now just leafing out. Anem- 
one, tiarella, mitre-wort, were abundant. 

Coming recently from watching the advance of 
spring in the South, the contrast was vast and strik- 
ino^. The luxuriant g^reen over the whole surface 
of the country, ground and tree alike bursting out 
in splendid color, had not been a feature of spring 
in Florida and South Georgia. Last year's vege- 
tation does not stand up here, dry and yellow, to 
be slowly hidden by the growth of this year, as in 
southern countries. Snow is a wonderful beauti- 
fier. It packs down the dead growth of the past, so 
that the first show of the new growth is visible and 



IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 21 

colors the earth and the landscape. There is a 
day when all the country looks wintry ; the next 
day soft green tints show in the damp hollows or 
on the southern slopes; then in one or two or three 
days the whole landscape has become brilliantly 
green. The forests have begun to color. We ail 
know the gorgeous autumnal colors, but little has 
been written of the exquisite tints of the spring 
forests in New England. They are often quite as 
beautiful as the autumn glories. They are softer 
tints, but more varied — pink, mauve, purple, and 
gray, in broad and gentle gradations, broken now 
and then by deep tints where the maple is budding. 
Sometimes in valleys, where willows are plenty and 
when sunlight falls richly after a shower, there are 
patches of golden yellow stretching across green 
fields which are as beautiful as one's golden dreams. 
Did you ever meet with one of those modern aesthet- 
ic maniacs who suggest improvements for Nature 
and criticise her minglings of color ? One such 
condemns, as "in bad taste," the mingUng of green 
with yellow in a field where thousands of yellow but- 
tercups bloom. Pie suggests, as much more cor- 
rect and pleasant to the eye, the contrast afforded 
by a midsummer field vv^here the white daisies are 
abundant. There is no disputing about tastes. 
Nature offers something for every one ; but that is 
a faulty education which has brought any one to 
apply to the works of the great Artist the arbitrary 



2 2 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

notions of what we call art criticism. Nature en- 
courages no ideas of harmony in color. She min- 
gles with a free hand all colors, and puts to shame 
the temporary and changing tastes of humanity, 
which trammel and harness artists and drive them 
on railway tracks of art production. Old nations 
of men are free from the foolish rules of so-called 
civilization in this matter of color. The gorgeous 
products and minglings of color which characterize 
the Chinese porcelains are doing a great deal to 
educate the dim and doubtful tastes of western Eu- 
rope and America. The Saracens understood bet- 
ter than any race of men in any age the value of 
free and unrestrained use of color, and contrasted 
colors without regard to any ideas of what is called 
harmony. They decorated houses and temples as 
Nature decorates the earth, and kept prominent al- 
ways the great lesson of the visible world, that with 
a blue sky and a green landscape every one of the 
infinite variety of hues of flowers is perfectly har- 
monious. 

Taking Brattleboro' as a starting-point, we could 
cross the Connecticut into New Hampshire or strike 
out westward into Vermont. Choosing the latter 
course, we could continue the route northward on 
the eastern side of the Green Mountains, wander- 
ing hither and thither on the way, or take one of 
the roads west\vard and cross the mountains. What 
matters it which road you take } It is always easy 



IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 23 

to turn your own carriage, change your direction, 
follow the new wish of the moment. We could go 
out to Wilmington, and over the Green Mountains 
to Bennington ; we could turn northward from Wil- 
mington and ascend and descend the hills of Dover, 
now getting far-off views over New Hampshire, now 
seeing to the west the Vermont mountains over- 
hanging lovely valleys. The country directly west 
of Brattleboro', although hilly, abounds in fine sce- 
nery, and the valley at Wilmington is as lovely as 
any Swiss valley. AYe chose a route to the north- 
west. We drove out on the right bank of West 
River, following up the stream, with intent to spend 
the night at Fayetteville, but loitered along the way, 
and after sunset pulled up at a little inn in Will- 
iamsville. 

There is seldom any trouble in finding employ- 
ment for the evening at a country inn or in the vil- 
lage. Sometimes the church-bell announces "even- 
ing meeting," and one may do worse than to attend 
it, if only for the sake of seeing people and study- 
ing character. Almost always the inn is the place 
of gathering for some of the natives, who discuss 
all kinds of subjects with abundant intelligence, 
and generally with striking clearness and simplicity 
of thought and diction. 

It is not difficult for a stranger to lead the con- 
versation towards local incident and history. There 
is no country village in the land which cannot fur- 



24 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

nish personal histories of sufficient interest to make 
volumes of very instructive bio^^raphy. You err 
if you imagine that only those lives are romantic 
which are passed among crowds in cities. The 
country life abounds in mysteries, romances. The 
clergyman or the doctor either could furnish the 
novelist Vv'ith a great deal of material. 

If you don't care to talk, you can always find on 
the table of the parlor, or on a shelf somewhere, a 
small stock of books ; and if you are a reading 
man from a city you will be very sure to find these 
books mostly new to you — books you never saw or 
heard of. There are very few book-stores in New 
England outside the large cities. The New York 
or Boston publishers who sell books through retail 
stores have no means of reaching the inhabitants 
of Vermont and New Hampshire, except in two or 
three cities. The American people have not learned 
to any great extent to order books by mail. In the 
country few books are bought except such as are 
brought to the door by agents. For this trade a 
great many books are made of which no one in the 
cities ever hears. They are of various classes of 
literature, some of them good, instructive compila- 
tions of history, travel, scientific information, some 
only trash, catchpenny books. It is always good- 
fortune if one finds that the local history of the 
town or county in which he is resting has been 
gathered and published. Many such histories have 



IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 25 

been made in the north country. They are gen- 
erally subscription -books, and special attention is 
given to the personal and family histories of sub- 
scribers. Portraits adorn them. Now and then an- 
cestral portraits are reproduced in wood or litho- 
graphic prints. They are always readable books, 
especially readable for the traveller. 

Williamsville is in the town of Newfane, a very 
old Vermont township. An excellent history of this 
town has been published abounding in material of 
much more than local interest. 

In 1789, at the old Field mansion on the 2 2d of 
February, Major Moses Joy was married to Mrs. 
Hannah Ward, widow of William Ward. This 
William Ward had died insolvent, leaving debts of 
considerable amount. At the second marriage 
Mrs. Ward stood in a closet with no clothing on, 
and held out her hand to Major Joy through a hole, 
and the ceremony was thus performed. 

This is the only instance I have ever met with in 
American history of what in England has been vari- 
ously called a smock marriage, or a marriage en 
cheinise. The idea was, and in parts of England 
still is prevalent, that if a husband takes a wife 
with nothing on her he avoids a legal liability to 
pay her debts, or the debts of a former husband, 
some of whose property she might possibly bring 
with her to her new alliance. This vulgar error 
has led to many curious marriages. One is re- 



26 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

corded in which the woman left her room in the 
night, naked, by the window, standing on the top 
round of a high ladder, where she put on new 
clothes, and came down feeling satisfied that she 
had left all old obligations in the house, and come 
out scot-free. I think I remember in Notes and 
Queries an account of the surprise of a clergyman 
in an English church, when a bride appeared for 
an appointed marriage, wrapped only in a white 
sheet, and this within a very recent period. The 
old error, it seems, prev^ailed in Vermont so late as 
1789, and Major Joy took what he thought the safe 
way of avoiding the responsibilities of the departed 
— and now not lamented — Mr. Ward. 

There was another old error which also lingered 
in Vermont, according to the Newfane historian. 
Inasmuch as a writ was directed in words com- 
manding the sheriff to take the body of the debtor, 
a common notion was held that the writ ran against 
that body living or dead. At a funeral in Dum- 
merston, the adjoining town (no date is given), the 
officers arrested the body on its way to the grave. 
The procession stopped, the bearers gave bail for 
the appearance of the debtor, buried him, and paid 
the debt. In 1820, one Lee, in prison on a bail 
bond, died. The sheriff would not deliver his 
body to his family, fearing it would amount to an 
escape, and himself become liable. The consent 
of the creditors was obtained, and the sheriff, thus 



IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 27 

relieved from his apprehended responsibihty, re- 
leased his prisoner. This strange error was not 
confined to Vermont. Similar instances of arrest- 
ing the body have been recorded in other parts of 
the country. 

In the morning we changed our minds and turned 
south-westward. The drive from Williamsville to 
Wilmington is one to be remembered, A good 
road with a slight upward grade for four miles, 
then up a hill, through a small village, on for a 
mile ; cross a bridge, up a steep hill, through Rock 
River village ; still uphill through forest, the air 
pure and life-giving ; uphill, uphill, a long steady 
pull to a church on a hill which is Dover Centre, 
and now behind us to the eastward there is no 
limit to our vision in the clear atmosphere which 
lies over New Hampshire. The blue horizon line 
away yonder must be almost where the sky and 
ocean meet. As we go on higher, the view seems 
to stretch yet farther into distance, east and north- 
east, and north, while close below us farms and 
valleys, hills and ravines lie as on a map. A half- 
mile beyond the church we cross the summit, and 
the western view of the Green Mountains bursts on 
us. And now we descend into a charming valley, 
and following a meadow brook which grows to 
be a river, and is the east branch of the Deerfield 
River, we reach Wilmington at noon. 

It is a pretty village in a pretty valley. Hence 



28 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

it is twenty miles to all sorts of places— twenty to 
Brattleboro,' twenty to Bennington, the same to 
Hoosac Tunnel and to Coleraine. 

It may serve to show the freedom of carriage trav- 
el if I rapidly indicate the ways we went after this 
from day to day. From Wilmington we drove on 
southward and westward to Readsboro' City, a busy 
village among the mountains, at the junction of the 
east and west branches of the Deerfield River. 
Thence our route lay up the West Branch, a wild 
road of much beauty, to Hartwellville ; then by a 
winding valley road to Stamford, and down to 
North Adams in Massachusetts ; through the un- 
rivalled scenery in which Williamstown is situated ; 
down the Hoosac valley, and around a shoulder 
of the mountain to Bennington in Vermont ; thence 
up the western side of the Green Mountains to 
Manchester. Northward now from Manchester, 
we drove up the beautiful valley between the high 
mountains on the east and Equinox and the Dorset 
mountains on the west, to Wallingford. There we 
turned the horses eastward again. From Man- 
chester we might have taken a route west of the 
Dorset Mountain, by which we would have gone 
to Lake St. Catharine, a very lovely lake, whereon 
is a large hotel in a grove of pines. Thence the 
route is pleasant and generally level, with good 
roads, to Rutland, or to Castleton and on north- 
ward. I have often driven in this direction. But 



IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 29 

now, without any special reason, we recrossed the 
Green Mountain range. 

The little highland village called Mechanicsville 
is in the town of Mount Holly, which includes the 
Green Mountain country east of VVallingford, where 
the hills run lower than to the northward and south- 
ward of it. The Central Vermont Railway line finds 
its way from Bellows Falls to Rutland across these 
lower hills in a north-westerly direction. The wagon 
road from Wallingford wanders in various beautiful 
ways. The pass across is one of the easiest and 
most practicable between the Massachusetts line 
and the gorge of the Winooski south of Mount 
Mansfield. 

The carriage traveller may do well to make a note 
of these passes. If you drive northward from Troy 
or elsewhere on the west side of the mountains, you 
can cross them to the east side and the Connecticut 
valley only by one or another of these mountain 
roads. 

From Bennington you can go over to Wilming- 
ton and Brattleboro' by a road which I have never 
happened to find in good order. From Manchester 
you can cross through Peru to Chester by a turn- 
pike road, usually in fair condition. From Walling- 
ford you can cross by the road I was now driving, 
to Ludlow. From Rutland you can cross by a road 
which I have found so wretched that the least said 
about it the better. From Brandon or Middlebury 



30 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

you can cross by good roads, that one which goes 
through Ripton passing the Bread Loaf Inn, and 
•descending eastward to the hilly country south of 
Montpelier. North of this you can go through the 
mountains by a good road, with no serious hills, 
along the bank of the Winooski, to Waterbury and 
Montpelier. Still north of this you can drive over 
the rolling country around the north end of the 
mountains from Burlington to Hyde Park. There 
are other roads through and over the Green Mount- 
ains, but none of them can be recommended with 
certainty from year to year as practicable for pleas- 
ure carriages. 

The morning was dark. We had had showers 
in the night, and the clouds still lay low in the 
valley at Wallingford. But a breath of air from 
the westward, slowly increasing, and beginning to 
move first the mists and then the leaves of the trees, 
gave promise of a clearing off. We did not start 
till late in the forenoon, and then the horses had 
four miles of pretty steady uphill work before them. 
A clear stream, swollen with last night's rain, roared 
down by the side of the road as we slowly ascended. 
There are doubtless trout in that stream, for along 
it now and then we saw boys fishing. None of 
them had any trout. All agreed that the water 
was too high, but all asserted the presence of trout. 
The faith of an angler is worthy the study of phi- 
losophers. If a boy knows that one trout has been 



IN SOUTHERN VERMONT 3 1 

taken in a stream, he will fish contentedly all day for 
another; and though he may take innumerable chubs 
and dace and minnows, without sight of the trout he 
seeks, he nevertheless throws in his bait a thousand 
times, and every time with perfect assurance that 
the next fish that takes it will have spotted skin 
and golden sheen below. So with all of us. They 
who know nothing about angling have few if any 
parallels in life to this faith, which is the underlying 
charm of going a-fishing. One cannot fish for long 
without success in a stream or lake in which he 
does not believe there are any fish. A few casts 
of the flies, a few minutes waiting for a bite at bait 
in this or that hole, and he abandons the place. 
But if he has seen a trout rise to a fly, or dash 
along the clear brook, it is enough. Thereafter 
faith takes hold of him, and the day goes on joy- 
ously to the end, even through he takes nothing. 
For the taking of fish is but a small part of the 
enjoyment of going a-fishing. The innumerable 
sounds and sights of nature, the luxury of open air, 
the clouds, the winds, the sunshine, the rain, the 
cutting off of thought of business, worry, care (which 
is cut off most effectually by the presence of the 
angler's faith in his rod and skill), these can be 
appreciated only by those who love to use rod and 
line. 

We drove through East Wallingford and then 
wandered over hills, with many far and many lovely 



32 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

views until, on a hill-top, we entered the little village 
of Mechanicsville, consisting of a large factory, two 
churches, and a group of white houses under trees. 
The factory makes children's toys. It was startling, 
away up on the top of the Green Mountains, on the 
outlet of a small lake, to find a village supported by 
an employment so closely related to the home life 
of all the country. The forests of the neighbor- 
hood grow the wood, the mountain streams drive 
the saw-mills which rough-shape it, a steam-engine 
whirls the turning lathes and the various machines 
which give form to the objects. Here is another 
subject of thought for the philosopher. The angling 
boys were the morning illustrations of faith. The 
noon resting-place is a village where the inhabitants 
live by play. Nothing but play. The waters of a 
beautiful lake flow out over the factory wheels, work- 
ing for play. Play clothes and feeds these families, 
enriches the manufacturers, supports perhaps these 
two churches whose spires rise side by side. It is 
a bright, cleanly, thriving-looking little village ; the 
houses are neatly painted; the gardens are brilliant 
with flowers. 

The frivolities of life have their uses. Children 
must play, ought to play; and grown men and 
women owe it to themselves to play sometimes. If 
you find any one who doubts the usefulness of play, 
tell him that it has its utility in this at least, that it 
runs a prosperous village in the Green Mountains, 



IN SOUTHERN VERMONT ;^^ 

and employs a happy population with remunerative 
work. 

In the afternoon our road led down the eastern 
slopes of the hills to the valley where Black River 
comes out from the succession of lakes at Plymouth 
and Tyson. We drove through Ludlow, and spent 
the night at Proctorsville. Next day we crossed 
the Connecticut into New Hampshire. 
3 



34 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



III 
A VILLAGE DISCUSSION 

I HAD pulled up at the door of a village store 
and gone in to make a purchase. I was standing 
at the counter. It was a cold day, and there were 
a half - dozen men sitting around the stove. All 
•were strangers to me, for the village was out of my 
regular course of driving. I would have gone out 
immediately after making my little purchase, but 
that a remark from one of the men to the surround- 
ing group interested me. It was made by a man 
whose face was bright and intelligent, but whose 
tone and style of talking marked him at once as 
somewhat dogmatic and given to laying down the 
law among his neighbors. I found afterwards that 
he was a young medical man, who had been but 
two or three years in the village, studious in his 
profession and remarkably successful, but fond of 
colhsions with the Freewill Baptist minister, whose 
church was the only one in the neighborhood. The 
Doctor was an "educated man ;" that is, he was a 
college graduate, and a man of some reading. The 
Minister was not an educated man, and the Doctor 



A VILLAGE DISCUSSION 35 

was a thorn in his side. Many locaHties in the 
country are situated much as this was. But, on 
the whole, the good -sense of the average man is 
superior to illogical reasoning, however specious, 
in or out of the pulpit, and sound orthodox belief 
holds its own against unsound reason and imagi- 
nary theology. 

They were talking about miracles, and the young 
Doctor said : " You know as well as I do, Stephen, 
that everything in this world moves in regular 
order. The laws of nature are what we all have 
to depend on, and they never change. It's certain 
that if you plant potatoes they won't come up 
pumpkins. Neither you nor any man here ever 
saw a miracle. You never heard of one in your 
life in these parts. You never heard of pumpkin 
vines growing from potatoes. It stands to reason 
and common-sense that when no man in this town 
ever saw anything happen that wasn't in the regu- 
lar course of natural law, anything supernatural, it 
isn't likely such things are going to happen here." 

I looked at Stephen, as the Doctor called him. 
He was an elderly man, hard - featured and sun- 
burned. There was a shrewd twinkle in his eye, 
but he looked at the stove and not at the Doctor, 
and there was silence for a moment while he pon- 
dered. Then he spoke in a mild, inquiring sort of 
way, which contrasted with the Doctor's somewhat 
self-opinionated tone. 



36 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

" I don't know much about the laws of natur', 
but I suppose you mean something Uke this — that 
when I let go that jack-knife it '11 fall on the floor ;" 
and he stretched out a long arm holding an open 
knife by the blade between his thumb and finger. 

" Exactly," said the Doctor ;'' that's the law of 
gravitation." 

"And it's sure to fall, and I can bet my money 
on it, and I needn't be afraid of a miracle ? Look 
here, Doctor, where did the law that binds it to fall 
come from } What made that particular law .?" 

The Doctor was honest; that was evident from 
his reply. " The learned men who have investi- 
gated the laws of nature have not found the origin 
of the laws. They will in time. It's only in recent 
years that science has made its great discoveries 
in the laws themselves. Heat, light, color, electric- 
ity, all the great characteristics of the changing 
world and of matter itself, have never been under- 
stood as they are now." 

" And you can't tell me what made the law that 
binds that jack-knife to fall down .^" 

" No, I can't. It's enough to know as certain 
that it will fall. Just let go, and you'll see the cer- 
tainty." 

"No chance of anything supernat'ral ; any mira- 
cle ?" 

" Miracle be hanged. Let go the blade." 

Stephen's thumb and finger separated and stood 



A VILLAGE DISCUSSION 37 

Stretched out wide apart. The jack-knife was not 
on the floor. It was hanging to the wooden ceiling 
overhead, its blade buried a half-inch in the soft 
pine. For about ten seconds no one spoke. 
Stephen was looking at the Doctor. 

" Suthin' supernat'ral happened, didn't it ?" said 
Stephen. 

" You jerked the knife up yourself." 

" Well, that warn't nat'ral, war it ?" 

The Doctor hesitated. " Now see here, Doctor," 
said the old man, " just tell me how old is your law 
that the jack-knife's got to fall down." 

" Millions of years old. Just as old as there has 
been anything to fall." 

" And how old was the law that said that jack- 
knife must go up there and stick its blade in that 
\vhite-pine ceiling. Just three minutes and a half 
old by the clock. Now what I want to know is 
where did your law that it must go down come 
from. You say you don't know. Well, it stands 
to sense, then, and you can't deny that it may come 
from some one that makes it go down just as I 
made it go up. If your science is worth a sneeze 
it oughtn't to deny what it don't know nothing 
about. And if that's so, it's always just as like as 
not whoever made the thing go down will make it 
go up, without you or I or any one else knowing 
what made it go, any more than you know what 
made me jerk that knife up yonder. You tell me 



38 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

that if I plant potatoes they won't come up squash- 
es, but you just tell me what plants potatoes, or 
what makes me plant 'em, anyhow. If I don't plant 
'em there ain't going to be any potatoes nor squash- 
es. It's according to reason that if potatoes come 
up because I planted potatoes, squashes don't come 
up from them, because some one else takes care of 
that part of the business. I don't believe in your 
argiments that laws always may be depended on, 
when you tell me yourself that you don't know 
where the laws come from and how long they're 
goin' to last. Your science is all right. Doctor, 
just as long as it talks about what it knows about. 
But when your science says a knife's bound to fall 
down, and don't take into account that something 
supernat'ral may interfere that science don't know 
nothing about, sich as my sudden making up my 
mind to jerk it up, why your science ain't wuth any 
more than a last year's almanac to tell a fellow 
what the weather's goin' to be." 

By this time Stephen's tone and style had changed. 
He was no longer humble and inquiring, but de- 
cidedly aggressive. There were some strong words, 
not exactly profane, adjectively applied to science 
in the last sentence, which I have omitted. He 
talked rapidly and vehemently and with pointed 
logic. Is logic one of the distinguishing character- 
istics of humanity? There are men, exceptions, 
sometimes men of eminence, who do not seem to 



A VILLAGE DISCUSSION 39 

have any idea of logic, but by the vast majority of 
men, however uneducated, logical sequence seems 
instinctively appreciated, and the most illiterate are 
very sure to detect failure in argument. 

As he talked he rose and stood up, six feet two 
— a mighty frame, fit for tremendous work — and he 
poured out a storm of plain and unanswerable phil- 
osophic truth, ending up in this wise : " No mira- 
cles, but only jest steady laws ? Well, accordin' to 
law that jack-knife will stick there till the wood 
rots or the steel rusts. Make your prophe-cy if 
you dare. Say what it '11 do. Is there any law 
that ^11 tell you what '11 come of it ? or whether 
Sam or Timmy won't have it down and pocket it 
as soon as I'm gone? You don't know. Well, I 
do. There's just such a law, and I made it ;" and 
so saying he reached up his long arm, seized the 
knife, and strode out of the door, growling as he 
went. 

" He's a cantankerous old cuss, but he's got a 
lot o' brains," remarked one of the group. The 
others signified assent. The Doctor said nothing, 
but stood looking at the spot in the ceiling where 
the knife had been. I followed the philosopher. 
As I drove up the road I overtook him and offered 
him a ride. He had not noticed me at the store. 
He discussed my horses, the merits of various styles 
of buck-board, the weather, the crops, and it was 
not until we approached a farm which he pointed 



40 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

out as his own that any allusion was made to the 
discussion. There was a field golden with huge 
pumpkins, which I think form the richest and most 
gorgeous-looking crop that is ever seen in the fields. 
"You didn't plant potatoes for that crop," I said. 
He looked puzzled, then broke into a hearty laugh. 
"You see the Doctor riled me a little, and I got 
mad. I tell you what it is. Mister, I never had an 
edication, and the Doctor had ; and it makes me 
mad when a man like him talks to a store full o' 
people as if he knew all he's a-talking about, when 
he don't. He's been going on about miracles for 
the last three weeks, because the elder preached a 
sermon on 'em. I don't belong to the meetin', but 
my old mother did. Do you see that bunch o' 
spruces over yonder } She's there. She believed 
in miracles. And she knew a heap more than I 
do. Now I just ask you this : which is best wuth 
believin', my old mother when she told me the 
miracles was true because there's a God over the 
airth, or these consarned edicated fools that go 
around saying there never could a-been no miracles 
because they don't know how to work 'em." 



UPHILL IN FOG 41 



IV 

UPHILL IN FOG 

Maps give little idea of the elevations or depres- 
sions in the surface of a country, except as the run 
of the watercourses indicates the slopes. The high 
mountains of Northern New Hampshire are gen- 
erally laid down on all maps, but few persons have 
any idea that in the lower part of the State there 
is very high land, and that to reach it from the 
Connecticut on the west, or the Merrimac on the 
east, an ascent of more than 1000, perhaps more 
than 1500 feet, must be accomplished. I have no 
means at present of ascertaining the elevation of 
the highest farms in such towns as Lempster, Wash- 
ington, and Stoddard. Some years ago, driving 
over the high farm country in Stoddard, I was told 
that this was the highest cultivated land in the 
State. This may be doubtful, but it is very high, 
and these towns ought to be above the hay-fever 
line. Judging from the experience of the direct 
pull up from Charlestown to Lempster, we should 
be inclined to think the latter village several thou- 
sand feet above the Connecticut. It was a mag- 
nificent ride. 



42 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

The morning was foggy. October frequently fills 
the Connecticut valley with fogs. This was very 
dense and dark. As we went out from Charles- 
town and began the uphill journey, we came slow- 
ly into thinner mist, and after awhile into that most 
weird and solemn of all lights, the golden atmos- 
phere of the October sun in fog among autumn 
forests. Stopping the horses on a water-bar for a 
little breath, we listened to the silence. Do you 
know what that means ? It is not listening to noth- 
ing. There are sounds and many of them ; but in 
the stillness of a foggy morning these sounds seem 
to cut sharply into the silence, and thus make you 
aware of the excessive stillness and calm which 
reign around you. The fall of a single leaf, broken 
off by the weight of moisture on it, is distinctly au- 
dible as it flutters to the ground. The voice of a 
crow, far away in the fog, comes through the yellow 
air with a metallic ring. You start along, and the 
crush of the wheels in the gravel is echoed from 
the side of the woods across a hollow, so that you 
think there is a water-fall over there. You stop 
again, and the echo dies away with a low murmur- 
ing along the trees, and the stillness is wonderful. 

Uphill and downhill, but more and more uphill, 
the road mounts the high land. Ahead of us there 
are long views between the maples and birches, the 
view ending in yellow mist. We think that point 
must be the top, but when we reach it the road 



UPHILL IN FOG 43 

swings around the side of the hill and stretches on 
up. We descend at length, but it is into a hollow, 
and it grows dark and darker in the fog as we go 
down, till at the bottom, where a stream crosses 
the road, we think it will rain in five minutes, so 
deep is the gloom ; but we go up again into the 
sunny mists, and at length, on a summit, feel for 
the first time a breath of air coming from the south- 
ward. When the air begins to move the fog will 
vanish. Its vanishing now is almost instantaneous. 
We have scarcely time to exclaim, " See that hill- 
top over yonder, and that one beyond, and this one, 
and " — far as the eye can reach, rolling away un- 
der the rich sunlight, lie the red-and-gold hills and 
the highland farms of New Hampshire. Patches 
of fog remain here and there and in hollows under 
the sides of hills, but they disappear in a few min- 
utes. The view is so sudden and so vast that even 
my horses stop short and look at it. 

But Lempster is still ahead of us, and we have 
yet higher heights to overcome. It was nearly 
twelve o'clock when we reached this little village — 
only four or five houses, with a new church and an 
abandoned old church. We had dinner, and then 
went over other heights to Washington. I do not 
know which stands the higher, Lempster or Wash- 
ington. Both are attractive places, on account not 
only of their elevation, but also of their splendid 
surroundings of scenery. 



44 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

Lovel Mountain is prominent near Washington. 
A farmer told me the legend of the origin of the 
name. I heard the story fifty years ago, and then 
believed it, as children believe, with ready faith. 
We grow sceptical as we grow older. But the farm- 
er told it as a historic verity, and it is probably 
about as true as nine-tenths of what we call history. 
He believed it, and I don't know why you should 
not. A settler near this mountain in early times, 
named Lovel, was splitting rails, when six Indians 
surrounded him and made him their prisoner. My 
informant was sure of the number — there were six. 
The settler agreed to go quietly with them if they 
would wait till he finished splitting the log he was 
at work on. They consented. He adjusted his 
wedge in the long split, and induced them to take 
hold of the two sides to hasten matters by pulling 
the log apart. Then knocking out his wedge, he 
caught their twelve hands tight and fast in the 
spring of the closing split, and applied his axe, se- 
riatim, to the six heads. The result was six dead 
Indians, and the later result the name Lovel 
Mountain. 



SWEET-SCENTED FERN 45 



SWEET-SCENTED FERN 

There can be no reasonable doubt that the sense 
which is most closely linked with our powers of 
memory is the sense of smell. We are greatly 
puzzled sometimes to know what has suddenly 
brought to mind an event of long ago, a person 
whom we have not thought of for years, a scene 
that has been forgotten since childhood. V^ry 
often this sudden memory has been roused by a 
passing odor, the never-lost perfume of a flower, a 
handkerchief, a meadow. So subtle are the opera- 
tions of the mind that we know little about them, 
and least of all about that stow-away place which 
we call memory. Neither you nor I know a hun- 
dred thousandth part of what we really do know, 
what we have learned, treasured, and now keep 
stored up ', only it is like some things we have so 
carefully laid away that we can't find them when 
we want them, or have ceased to know that we 
possess them. 

There was once a boy. It was a great while ago ; 
that is, it seemed to him a long while to come, 



46 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

when he, a boy, looked forward to the old age he 
afterwards reached. But when he was an old man 
it did not seem such a great while ago that he was 
a boy, living in a small house, half log half clap- 
board, on the edge of a clearing in New Hampshire. 
This boy lived there very much alone ; for though 
he had a father and a mother, it goes without say- 
ing that a small boy on a new farm leads a lone- 
some life when father and mother are at work all 
the waking hours. When he was ten years old he 
was a hard-working boy too. He had never been 
to school, never even learned to read. There was 
not a book, not so much as a Testament, in the 
house ; and so far as he had ever heard, there were 
no books in the world, nor any God in it or over it. 
I wonder if you know, what is the solemn fact, that 
there are families, American families, with one, two, 
and many children, in New England States, of ex- 
actly this description. 

Another family came into that part of the coun- 
try, and another small house went up on the oppo- 
site bank of the lake ; for the houses stood on a 
pond, or lake, which was a half-mile broad and two 
or three miles long, and the old forest was all 
around it except for the two clearings. Now came 
into that boy's life a new light, and he began to 
know the world ; for there was a daughter in the 
other family, besides two sons ; and what cannot a 
boy learn of the world from two other boys and 



SWEET-SCENTED FERN 47 

one happy little girL He learned more from her 
than from them. For somehow he learned from 
her to look into himself, and think about himself 
and what he was. That is a long step towards 
knowledge of the world when a boy gets into the 
way of studying himself thoughtfully. For ahnost 
all the joys, ambitions, and enjoyments ; almost all 
the sins, labors, and sorrows of mature life are min- 
iatured in the boy life. The little pleasures of the 
child are like in character to the great pleasures 
of the man. The triumph of a successful attack 
on a woodchuck's hole is the far-away antetype of 
a great operation in stocks or the brilliant capture 
of a large corporation. 

Many a summer evening when his work was 
done he paddled his dug-out across the pond, and 
he and she drifted along the shore, and he sat si- 
lent while she told him stories of the town in which 
she had lived, and the people in that (to her) great 
assemblage of humanity. Many a Sunday they 
wandered together in the woods and out in the 
clearing along the bank of the lake, brushing 
through thick masses of fern that filled the sunny 
atmosphere with delicious odor. 

After the first few months of their acquaintance, 
when he was tweU^e and she was ten years old, he 
had begun to regard her as the dependence of his 
life, and so to look to her for help. It was hard 
work to bring himself to confess to her that he did 



48 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

not know how to read ; but he did it, and asked 
her to teach him. There was a rock among the 
sweet-scented fern by the shore, where in the pleas- 
ant Sunday mornings she gave him regularly a four- 
hours' lesson. She was not long in teaching him 
all she knew, and after that they progressed to- 
gether. 

They talked much and thought much. She told 
him Bible stories, and they were about the only 
stories she knew except two or three wonderful 
fairy stories which he and she mixed up with the 
Bible stories, until they grew wiser, as new settlers 
came and brought books, which they borrowed. 
Much they learned out of their own heads, reading 
together and giving each to the other, in childish 
wise ways, their deductions and reasonings about 
things visible and invisible, things of earth and 
things unearthly if not truly heavenly. Do you 
imagine their deductions were worthless.? Nay, 
the ratiocinations of a boy and a girl about the in- 
finite and invisible are about as valuable in result 
as are those of many of the philosophers which fill 
the thousand pages of modern books. They learned 
as much of final truth as you can learn from all the 
metaphysicians. 

It needs not to say that he learned the old les- 
son of love at the same time, or even before he 
learned his letters among the ferns. So began his 
life. At seventeen he came out from his wild 



SWEET-SCENTED FERN 49 

home into the crowded world. There is no space 
to tell of his method of farming his new farm. He 
went at it with the experience of the boy who had 
cleared a forest and rolled rocks out of the meadow 
land. It w^as a terrible piece of work, begun with 
semi-starvation, carried on with slow, steady deter- 
mination. Starting as a day-laborer, he achieved 
in six years or so a superintendent's position with 
a living salary. Then he went back to the old 
farm and married Harriet, who had waited for him, 
and brought her to the city. 

Fifty years went along, and neither he nor she 
ever again saw the north country. He accumulated 
property, and they were good members of their so- 
cial circle, regular in daily life and Sunday church- 
going. They had changed, and yet had not changed. 
Their young lives had been devoid of romance, 
and there was no romance or sentiment in growing 
rich or growing old. Practically they had forgot- 
ten their youth. Certainly they never thought or 
talked of it. I said their youth was without ro- 
mance. Yet beyond doubt the forming period in 
their lives had been when the unspeakable beauty 
of a boy's and a girl's love hallowed those sunshiny 
days. They did not know that there was any ro- 
mance in young love on the silver lake in the 
mountain moonlight. They did not know there 
was any romance when he lay in the ferns at her 
feet and listened while she taught him that b-o-y 
4 



50 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

spells boy and g-i-r-1 spells girl and 1-o-v-e spells 
love. Therefore there was no romance about it. 
It was simple matter of fact. They lived matter- 
of-fact lives when poor, and the same when rich 
and when surrounded with all the luxuries and 
elegancies which great wealth commands. They 
lived, in short, very much as many rich people live 
who have few resources for mental occupation, 
who are not given to much reading or much think- 
ing — in fact, just living along, and keeping at the 
old daily routine of employments. There are 
many who live in this way, having neither past to 
enjoy in retrospect nor future to enjoy in prospect, 
only comfortable in the monotonous present. 

He was growing feeble. His brain was weary 
or worn. It hurts the brain to use it forever on 
one line of employment. His had been used for 
nothing but business work now a half-century, and 
whether in memory, judgment, or looking to the 
future, no thought had occupied it except thought 
of property, buying and selling and getting gain. 
He had not for years been at three minutes' dis- 
tance from a telegraph-station. His idea of a sum- 
mer vacation was to go to a hotel where stock bul- 
letins were always kept up, and stock operations 
were the day and evening subjects of discussion. 
No wonder that there came a time when he began 
to grow strangely silent, sometimes as if drowsy, 
sometimes morose. Then he suddenly seemed to 



SWEET-SCENTED FERN 5 1 

forget everything, and neither spoke nor wrote, 
nor went to his private telegraphic instrument ; for 
he had made his house an annex to his office and 
the Exchange, and had hved practically day and 
night in the street. 

They said his brain was done with work, and his 
end was near. Still he walked and rode around, 
but never alone. One day he was riding with his 
wife in the carriage along an up-town road, silent, 
unobservant, apparently in a stupor, when sudden- 
ly he exclaimed, " How sweet the ferns smell in 
this sunshine, Harriet." She turned to him, and 
saw that his eyes were closed. She took him 
home, and after that he lay, week after week, quiet, 
but apparently without knowing or noticing any- 
thing or any one. But sometimes they saw a 
smile spread over his pale face, as if pleasant 
thoughts were in the old brain. After months of 
this, one evening in the twilight he reached out his 
hand to her and said, " How sweet the ferns are, 
Hattie." Then he seemed perplexed about it, and 
said, " How sweet the ferns were, Hattie," and 
then after a little he came into his right mind. 

If in the other life, which is alongside of this our 
life, close to us, but invisible to us, there are, as we 
are taught by some serious teachers, angels ap- 
pointed to each of us, who are sometimes able to 
influence our thoughts, it would seem sometimes 
as if those angels held in their hands the ghosts of 



52 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



things that are gone, the shades of our lost objects • 
of delidit, and somehow made us sensible of their 
nearness. Did his angel and her angel hold in 
their hands fragrant ghostly ferns gathered long 
ao-o, with subtle odors, sensible not to the actual 
sense, but quite so to the mental sense ? Or did 
they bring fronds that grow in elysian fields, which 
bear odors Uke those that are here associated with 
our purest recollections? Why not? There are 
rivers there, and why not golden-rod on their banks, 
and fragrant mints and ferns ? It must have been 
from heaven, with attendant benediction, that the 
odor of the ferns came often to him. For now 
they two, old man and old wife, lived again togeth- 
er for many weeks and even months the young life. 
All its old unrecognized romance and all its ample 
delight and happy peace of mind came back to 
them. They talked now of every tree and rock 
and flower-bed, of every odor of field and forest. 
You know we cannot describe an odor; we can 
only say how sweet or disagreeable it was ; but al- 
ways their saying was, " Do you remember how the 
air was full of the fragrant everlasting that Sep- 
tember day when we did so and so ?" and they 
talked over the old stories; and now she found 
them in books and read them to him, and the truth 
that was in them seemed very true. For were they 
not both rapidly n earing the world whereof they 
had talked so much and thought so much, and were 



SWEET-SCENTED FERN 53 

they not soon to see Moses and David and Zac- 
cheus and Bartimeus ? For a year or more they 
were as happy as two children, happy as they had 
been when children ; happier, I think, for their 
old hearts went rioting around in the memories of 
those days, and all the pains of them were gone. 
Once in the summer-time he said he wished when 
he should be dead she would send and get a great 
deal of sweet-scented fern and cover him with it. 
And she did so. And two or three years after 
that she died. Do you believe there will be ferns 
in heaven, sweet ferns, whose odors fill the air and 
help to memories of young life here ? The old 
song of the Church says, " There cinnamon and 
sugar grow, there nard and balm abound." If they 
reach heaven, and ferns grow there, they two will 
be found often on some fern-bank. To them that 
would add much to what Gregory called "the 
sweet solemnity of those who are come home from 
the sad labor of this wandering." 



54 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



VI 

AN ANGLER'S AUGUST DAY 

It was late in the afternoon of a superb August 
day, and I had yet some fifteen miles to drive, all 
the way over hills, and the last three miles up the 
mountain. I was driving the black horses, heavy 
animals, but swift devourers of mountain roads, 
rushing up hills and going down them with sure 
steps. 

I had been far down the western valley, fishing a 
magnificent stream which is seldom visited by an- 
glers, and has in it a goodly stock of trout. It is 
not to be supposed that in this hot month one can 
take a large basket of fish in any lake or stream, 
unless the weather be exceptionally favorable. And 
this day had been by much too bright. Neverthe- 
less I had accomplished all that could be desired, 
all that any sensible angler has right to desire. I 
had strolled a mile or more, sometimes in, some- 
times alongside of a glorious torrent, wandering its 
ancient way through primeval forest, down the last 
slope of a mountain ravine. J\Iy basket was not 
full, but there were a couple of dozen of fair-sized 



AN angler's august DAY 55 

fish in it, and some dozens of smaller and more 
toothsome trout ; for to my taste the only trout 
which equal fresh sardines in delicacy and flavor 
are the little fellows, from clear cold waters, which, 
fried brown and crisp with good salt pork, you take 
by their tails in your fingers and eat bodily, to your 
gastronomic satisfaction. 

The road now led along a flat stretch of wooded 
country and came out in a clearing, where has been 
for more than thirty years a small saw -mill. A 
stream, rising in a swamp a mile or two above the 
mill, is dammed at the road-crossing, and sets back 
a small pond of two or three acres, mostly shallow, 
except where the old bed of the brook winds 
through it. The pond was a mirror in the now 
reddening light of the sun which just rested on the 
ridge of a tree -fringed hill to the westward. A 
small boy was standing at the road-side, looking at 
the water. Oddly enough he recognized me, as 
having more than once met me on streams in the 
neighborhood. "Oh, mister !" he shouted, as he saw 
me, and ran towards the buck-board. Of course I 
pulled up. 

"There's a buster of a trout in the pond this 
year. You can see him walloping around every 
day just about this time. There he goes now. Isn't 
he a slosher ?" 

Up at the head of the pond, where the stream 
came in, there was a great swash in the water, and 



56 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

the waves which rolled away in a circle indicated a 
heavy animal of some sort. 

" Isn't it a musk-rat ?" 

" No, sir," with emphasis on the last word. " I've 
seen him go two feet up into the air more times nor 
you can count. He mostly stays up there. But he 
won't take no worm nor grasshopper. Last June 
father tried him with a white grub, but you see its 
shaller water up there, and we can't get nowhere 
near him with the raft without scaring him." 

" Where is your raft ?" 

" Down there by them willers." 

I handed over the reins to my driv^er and took 
my rod. It was ready for instant use. I never 
drive in this country without a rod in the wagon, 
and when actually off for a day's fishing I do not 
take the rod apart until I have left the last possible 
angling places behind me for the day. There were 
two flies on the leader, which was stout, for fishing 
a rough river. They were not flies likely to be of 
any use on a still pond ; so I put on a gossamer 
leader, with two small gnats for bobbers and a 
small white moth for the tail. It was early for the 
moth, but as it was already on the leader in my fly- 
book I did not change it. 

The raft was a boy's, built for some seventy-five 
pounds of humanity to float on. Two hundred 
weight was almost too much for it, and it sunk one 
or the other end as I balanced myself on it, stand- 



AN ANGLER S AUGUST DAY 57 

ing in my rubber boots with a varying depth of 
water swashing over my feet. I poled out into and 
across the pond towards the inlet. The boy was 
right as to the swirl being that of a trout. As I 
pushed along carefully and looked ahead I saw two 
similar swirls three rods apart. There were two of 
them then, at least, and possibly more ; for now I 
began to recall the fact that years ago the owner 
of the saw-mill told me there were large trout in his 
pond which he could not take ; but I then thought, 
from its shallow character, with muddy bottom, that 
he probably saw pickerel or some other fish, espe- 
cially as the next owner a few years afterwards had 
told me there were no trout in the pond and no 
small trout in the swamp brook above it. 

Did you ever pole a raft over a pond with soft 
mud bottom ? No ? Then you have never enjoyed 
the finest possible illustration of many scientific 
principles, action and reaction, the correlation and 
conservation of forces, the attraction of cohesion, 
innumerable interesting subjects of consideration, 
all of which would be pleasant to study if you were 
not occupied with your immediate purpose of get- 
ting across the water. There is a pleasant assur- 
ance of advance as you drop the end of the pole, 
push gently downward and backward, looking for- 
ward, and the pole passes through your grasp, 
renewed again and again, till the end is in your 
hand and you hold on to draw forward for another 



58 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

shove. But you can't draw it forward. It draws 
you backward, and the heavy raft, moving ahnost 
imperceptibly, has yet, with your added weight, 
sufficient momentum to go forward with your feet 
while your hands remain stationary, and you turn 
around, desperately grasping one end of the pole 
whose other end has gone down deep into the tena- 
cious bottom mud. It went down so easily, gently, 
softly, that while you thought you had pushed your 
raft ten feet forward, you had only pushed your 
pole nine feet into the mud ; and yet, lovingly as it 
went into the soft bottom, it refuses to return. Look 
out for yourself now. Hold on to the pole, or you 
will be adrift on the pond with no means of reach- 
ing shore. Hold on with your toes, with the soles 
of your boots, with your knees, anyhow you can, 
hold on to the raft. I have seen many an inex- 
perienced man push his raft out from under his 
feet. I have done it myself in days of juvenile in- 
experience. 

My raft was not a very heavy one, and the rule 
is to use your pole without deep pushing on such 
ponds, rather dragging, with the end only a little 
way in the mud. 

I had followed the edge of the old bed of the 
brook, and with patience and perseverance came 
within a hundred feet of the place where the last 
trout had risen. There was no perceptible motion 
in the air, but there was a motion, nevertheless, 



AN ANGLER S AUGUST DAY 59 

such as anglers are familiar with, indicated by the 
fact that your cast goes out more easily with than 
against it. My rod was good for long casting, and 
I could lay the white moth-tail fly down within a 
few feet of the spot I desired to reach. I laid it 
down there a dozen times, and nothing else dis- 
turbed the surface, which now reflected a rosy 
cloud in the south-west. The sun had gone down. 
The original impetus given the raft and the exist- 
ing movement of the atmosphere were carrying me 
slowly towards the mouth of the brook, which came 
out, a rod wide, between high banks covered with 
dense sedges. Up in the stream I saw three or 
four times the lift of a trout's head as he rose 
gently to the surface and took in some floating in- 
sect. He was feeding, August fashion, on some 
very small gnat, too small for imitation. So I tried 
approximation, changing the tail -fly, and for the 
white moth substituting a minute black object, the 
smallest lure known to my book, or any one's book, 
being a tiny hook, smaller than any regular number, 
tied with a yellow body and a delicate sparse black 
hackle, not an eighth of an inch long. I had drifted 
to the very mouth of the brook by the time this was 
ready, and the first cast sent it far up the canal-like 
stream. As it struck the water there was a mag- 
nificent roll of the glassy surface, a flash of reflected 
blue and crimson and pink and white in the wa- 
ter. It was as if some gorgeous piece of fireworks 



6o ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

had burst on the dark surface between the sedge 
banks. 

How many pounds of trout flesh and force were 
now on the end of that gossamer leader I shall 
never be able to tell you, for when he felt the 
slight stroke which fixed the tiny hook in his 
mouth, he made one swift, short rush, and I found 
that the leader was fastened on something heavier 
than a trout. There was nothing to do but break 
it loose or pole up the stream and try to unfasten 
it. I broke it, for I wanted another cast over that 
water. Half of the leader came home, with one fly 
yet on. I looped the end, put on another of the 
same small black hackles, cast three times ; at the 
third cast again saw the brilliant explosion of the 
water-surface, again struck a heavy fish, and was 
again fast to something immovable. 

This time I poled up to the spot. I might have 
hooked a hundred fish there and should never have 
gotten one. For my tail-fly had fallen each time 
just about ten feet beyond a great tree-trunk — a 
smooth, round log, two feet thick — of which the 
two ends were embedded in the banks on either 
side, while the log itself stretched across the stream 
about six inches below the surface. Under it the 
water was ten feet deep, and the fish had risen from 
this hole and plunged back into it, catching the up- 
per flies in the log. 

Twilight was established by the time I had put 



AN angler's august DAY 6 1 

on the small white moth which I proposed to use 
for the last few casts. You will observe that my 
raft would not go over the log, and I could go no 
farther up-stream. So I sent the flies up again 
and again and again, while the night gathered rap- 
idly. Our twilights grow short up here in August. 
The air was ringing with the voices of frogs, with 
indescribable variety of tone and annunciation. 
The sharp cry of a night-bird in the air overhead 
pierced my ears. I saw a great Cecropia moth 
crossing the stream just beyond my cast, and a 
dozen smaller moths flitting over the sedges. Sud- 
denly, behind me, a trout rose in the old place. I 
fixed the pole against the log, pushed the raft 
back, and dropped the tail-fly in the centre of the 
circle of waves. This time I struck my fish firmly, 
and he went for open water ; it was an easy matter 
to bring him in ; he was only a two-pounder. A 
two-pound trout is a small affair to the angler who 
has lost a four-pounder. And those two fish I lost 
were, of course, four-pounders — five-pounders; who 
can prove to me that they were not ? 

Whatever their weight, I was fully as content as 
if they were in my basket, w-liich hung on my 
shoulder, or on the dry end of my raft if they were 
too large for the basket. I see your smile of in- 
credulity, my friend; but you are one of the mis- 
erably uneducated community who will never ap- 
preciate the fact that the joy of the angler's day is 



62 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

in the surroundings of his sport. The very regrets 
he may have for lost fish are pleasant, not painful, 
if the day has been bountiful in the ordinary de- 
lights which attend the fisherman. My day had 
been exceedingly rich. As the horses came up the 
dark mountain road, guiding their own steps since 
I could not see to guide them, I recalled a score of 
beautiful scenes along the course of the mountain 
torrent, great bowlders lying in the foam, fern-cov- 
ered cliffs, under which the river ran swift and 
smooth, giant white birch -trees on the bank, the 
outposts of armies of mighty trees behind them, 
rank on rank as far as eye could penetrate their 
array. And the dark lagoon-like stream, on which 
the twilight came down till the stars were reflected 
in it ; the swoop of the nighthawks overhead ; the 
call of the whippoorwill sitting on the saw-mill roof 
and the answer of his kin on the hill-side beyond — 
where can one close the catalogue of sights and 
sounds and thoughts, which made the hour's delay 
at the mill-pond a charming episode at the close 
of an angler's August day ? 



VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 63 



VII 

VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 

" He was a very old man," said the landlord. 

" How old ?" I asked ; " what do you mean by 
'very old?'" 

"Well, close on to ninety, I should say. No one 
exactly knew, and he didn't know himself. At 
least he said he didn't." 

" He ought to have known a great deal." 

" Well, it ain't always the man that lives the 
longest that learns the most. But Uncle Zekel did 
know a considerable deal. There wasn't a tree or 
a plant around here he couldn't tell you something 
about. There wasn't a square foot of land within 
ten miles that he didn't know everything that would 
or wouldn't grow on it. Then he understood the 
weather better than the newspapers nowadays, 
and he knew human natur' through and through. 
He never made a mistake in judgin' a man. He 
was sharp as a steel-trap when any one tried to 
come it over him. But he was so kind o' simple in 
his ways and his talk that strangers never thought 
much of him. Yes, he knew a great deal more 



64 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

than any of the rest of us hereabouts. Somehow 
everybody believed that he could see farther into a 
stone than any other man." 

We were talking of an old man recently dead. 
It was at a way-side inn in ^'ermont, where I had 
stopped for the horses to feed and rest, and I was 
talking with the farmer-landlord, seated under a tree 
that shaded the front of the cottage-inn. Across 
the road, a little way below, there was a gathering 
at the door of a small house, which had led to the 
talk. The village people were coming together to 
carry to his grave the oldest resident, and while 
they were gathering the landlord told me about 
him. 

No one now living remembered when he came to 
this part of the country. He was a Scotchman by 
birth, and though long practice had modified his 
voice and accent, there always remained in it some 
of the peculiarity which is musical to all who are 
familiar with Highland voices. He had been mar- 
ried in his early life, had children, and a household 
whose memories he sometimes, but rarely, referred 
to. All were gone. Wife and children had now 
lain side by side in the village graveyard for more 
than a half-century. All his friends of early life 
were gone as well. Most of them rested in the 
same safe enclosure. 

Now this man's life was not, you will say, remark- 
able in anything. It was but the common life of 



VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 65 

man in the country, only a little longer than the 
average. You are right in this, tliat it was only an 
ordinary human life, but every life is remarkable, 
and worth studying. I had small opportunity for 
study of this. But I went across the road and 
joined the increasing assembly. He was lying in 
the middle of the small room into which the door 
opened. There was no fire on the broad hearth. 
" It's the first time that hearth has been cold for 
fifty years that I remember," said the landlord. 

In the room were many evidences of the life he 
had led, memorials which no one now lived to 
cherish. An old musket and a muzzle-loading gun 
hung: on one side of the room. The antlers of a 
moose and several of red deer were disposed as 
conveniences for hanging household utensils. Sev- 
eral strangely worn stones from rivers, curiously 
twisted and involved growths of trees, brilliant bits 
of mica and other minerals, were on the mantel- 
shelf over tlie fireplace. There was no ceiling to 
the room. The rafters were bare, and the sheath- 
ing on the sides was nearly black with smoke and 
time. 

It was not the hour or place in which to indulge 
curiosity, but I could not shut my eyes to the sur- 
roundings out of which this life had gone. And 
when some one gave me a chair I found myself 
seated by a small solid table, on which lay one 
book, a copy of the Breeches Bible. It was verily 
5 



66 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

a family Bible. It was an edition, if I remember 
aright, of 1595. And on the margins and blank 
reverses of leaves, in old and faded ink, there were 
pithy sentences written by generations of Scotch 
Presbyterians, of whom this man lying dead here 
was last. He, too, had gone to join the numerous 
company, among whom are martyrs and saints, and 
along his path, as he had travelled here almost a 
century, he had the same old guide-book they had 
used. It is a wonderful guide-book : good for men 
in the rush and crush of cities, as for men in the 
quiet, lonesome places of the up-country. 

As he lay there men talked freely about him, and 
it was wonderful to hear the affection and respect 
which were universally expressed for him. Every 
one had loved him, and all alike felt the loss of a 
friend. On his farm, a hundred rods from the 
house, was a knoll which rose gently on one side 
some seventy or eighty feet, and from its summit 
fell off precipitously to the river which ran with 
loud voice over rocks below. It had been a fa- 
vorite resting-place with the old man, and the young 
man when he was growing old. There were stones 
so arranged by accident that they made a seat, not 
very comfortable, but men do not seek cushioned 
resting-places in the up-country. He had seen suns 
rise and suns set many times, sitting there. ]\Iuch 
of the gentleness of his nature had come from the 
long habit of sitting there a little while now and 



VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 67 

then and thinking. More had come from that old 
Bible ; and the two — the holy book and the calm 
contemplation — had worked together in his soul. 
He had some favorite subjects of thought which 
he occasionally talked about. The marvel of the 
universe, which bothers philosophic theorists, was no 
marvel to him, but one grand fact which he realized. 
" I can never forget," said the village pastor, " how 
he impressed me with a sudden exclamation when 
v/e were talking about the discoveries of science 
and the laws of nature. He said, ' What idea can 
any man have of God who thinks, with his poor 
eyes and inventions of glass and brass, he can see 
into and across the whole province which his God 
governs.' Another time he said, ' I'm a Democrat 
with men, but with God there is no democracy, to 
my notion. Men get to preaching equality so 
much that they don't believe themselves any lower 
than the angels, and imagine that the universe is 
ruled by a Master who will exist or not, just as his 
subjects think best.' 

*' ' Star-gazing you call it, do ye,' he said to one 
who saw him sitting on his porch one night. 'Yes, 
but I'm not looking at the stars ; I'm looking be- 
tween and beyond them, and I see a country out 
yonder in which there's no law of nature, no attrac- 
tion, no force, nothing that I read about in men's 
books, only the will of God, which is light and force 
and law and all.' " 



68 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

Such expressions indicate the effect on his mind 
of his habit of thought on the hill-top. In all times 
men have gone up into high places to think and to 
pray. There is no place so lonesome as the sum- 
mit of a hill. It lifts a man out of the world. I 
have known many men, of utterly irreverent and 
thoughtless character of mind, awed and terrified 
at finding themselves on high mountain peaks, and 
afraid to stay there. I remember once, many years 
ago, when there was no hotel on Mount Washing- 
ton, and I had gone up there intending to stay all 
night and see the sun rise, a sense of awe and lone- 
someness overtook me which I vainly strove to re- 
sist. I had passed nights alone in forests, on the 
sea in an open boat, but this was intolerable. 
There was a feeling, indeed, of lonesomeness, but 
at the same time of being surrounded by an unseen 
crowd of witnesses. So I was driven down, and 
made my dangerous way into lower regions more 
associated with my young humanity. 

But the old man was never alone on his hill-top, 
having in long years learned to talk much with the 
unseen who met him there, and look earnestly into 
space if perchance he might see there a vision of 
superhuman beauty. And one day he saw what he 
had waited for. It was a clear, cool summer day, 
with a north-west wind drifting clouds across an in- 
tensely blue sky. A neighbor who had occasion to 
see him, not finding him at home, walked out and 



VIEWS FROM A HILL-TOP 69 

up the hill just after sunset. The old man was sit- 
ting on the rock seat, reclining on another rock 
which supported his back and head. He had been 
looking into the depths of the clear atmosphere, and 
as he lay there looking, there came suddenly into 
his vision that which eye hath not seen from earthly 
mountain peak ; ear hath not heard from voice, how- 
soever eloquent and musical ; heart of man, even 
his gentle, thoughtful heart, had not conceived. 
Who shall attempt to say with what serene and 
solemn joy the old man had seen the blue heavens 
opened, and the glory that is not of sun or stars, and 
had entered into it ! 



70 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



VIII 

OVER THE HIGHLANDS OF WESTERN NEW 
HAMPSHIRE 

It was a fresh autumn morning when we left the 
village of New London, high up on the hills of cen- 
tral New Hampshire, and drove westward, without 
any definite idea of our destination. 

New Hampshire possesses all kinds of scenery 
and soil. The northern mountain country falls off 
into a valley which crosses the western half of the 
State, in no very direct line, from the valley of the 
Connecticut near Hanover to the valley of the Mer- 
rimac near Franklin Falls. South of this valley — 
the west half of the State — running north and south, 
is a range of highlands, mostly now or formerly un- 
der cultivation, rising in farm-lands at times to a 
height which I believe is considerably more than 
I GOG feet above the sea. You know Mount Kear- 
sarge, near North Conway. But few persons seem 
to know that there is another Mount Kearsarge in 
the State. This lies at the northern or north-east- 
ern end of the range of highlands of which I speak, 
and is, in part, in the town of New London, or di- 
rectly east of it in Warn, the next town. It is a 



HIGHLANDS OF WESTERN NEW HAMPSHIRE 7 1 

noble hill, rising alone out of the cultivated rolling 
lands. Away down in the south-western part of the 
State a similar mountain rises in stately grandeur, 
Monadnock by name, and thence the highlands 
of New Hampshire fall off gently towards Massa- 
chusetts. 

This topographical account is not interesting, but 
it is necessary to understand it if you would under- 
stand carriage travel to the southward in the State, 
west of the Merrimac River. You can drive from 
the Profile House or the Crawford House to Hart- 
ford, following the valleys of the Amonoosuck and 
the Connecticut, without a hill of any account 
.on the road. The scenery along the entire route 
is lovely bej-ond all praise, its variety infinite, its 
beauty equal in spring, summer, and autumn. The 
roads are, however, somewhat sandy and heavy, es- 
pecially in dry weather. 

You can also drive from either notch, Franconia 
or the Crawford, through the eastern part of New 
Hampshire southward to Massachusetts, over roads 
without severe hills and with varying scenery, most 
of it very beautiful. 

But I prefer the hill roads through the highland 
country between the Merrimac and the Connecti- 
cut. These roads are in general good, the road- 
beds hard, and the many fine views repay the la- 
bor of climbing hills. Withal, horses do better, if 
carefully driven, on rolling than on level roads. 



72 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

I had come from the Profile House down the 
Pemigewasset Valley through Plymouth to Bristol, 
thence across to New London, via Danbury, Wil- 
mot, and Scytheville. At this last place I had 
reached the bottom of the cross-valley which I have 
mentioned, and thence the road to New London 
was uphill all the way, with Kearsarge on the left 
and behind us. New London is one of the high 
hill-towns, and every house in the village looks off 
many miles over fields and forests. 

Turning the horses' heads to the southward, I 
could have gone down through Sutton and Brad- 
ford, and thence over tremendous hills to Washing- 
ton. Turning them to the west, I should have a 
short drive to Lake Sunapee, which lies on the up- 
land, surrounded by low wooded hills. I had driv- 
en both roads repeatedly. I am never tired of 
driving the last named, for it is exceedingly beau- 
tiful, and we chose it now. 

In half an hour we were going through the dense 
woods which skirt Little Sunapee, the upper of a 
chain of three lakes, and of which you see only 
glimpses as you pass along by it, until you reach 
its outlet, which goes down into Otter Pond. Here 
the road strikes the upper end of Otter Pond, and 
sweeps around on its open shore for a quarter- 
mile. The pond is charming, a mile or two long 
and nearly as wide. The shore is clean sand and 
the water pellucid. I have waded off on this hard, 



HIGHLANDS OF WESTERN NEW HAMPSHIRE 73 

sandy bottom and taken black bass with the fly, 
casting out to right and left, while my horses stood 
waiting on the road. 

Fish Commissioners in some of our States have 
laboriously spoiled the fishing in a great many wa- 
ters by introducing these black bass. Pickerel or 
perch or pumpkin-seeds are a more valuable food- 
fish to the farming population than black bass, and 
black bass when placed in a pond will destroy all 
other fish. It is only a question of time, and the 
destruction is sure to be complete, except in large 
bodies of water. The bass are protected by law 
till June 15th, and in some States till July ist. In 
July and August they can be taken only with prop- 
er tackle and strong tackle, such as the farmer's 
boy does not possess. As soon as the weather 
and the water begin to grow cold, these fish begin 
to find places where they hibernate. After the 
middle of September they cannot be taken at all 
by any one with any tackle except in large lakes, 
and in those not after October. Here, then, is a 
fish of very small value to a population. It is time 
that all laws protecting them in the spring were re- 
pealed. Let the farmer get them whenever he can. 
There is no danger of their extermination — I wish 
there were ; but if their increase can be kept down 
in the smaller lakes and ponds, it may happen that 
some other fish will survive. 

We drove slowly around the head of Otter Pond, 



74 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

then through the forest road along its rocky shore, 
with the water lapsing over the stones and making 
pleasant music in the sunshine. Then we came 
out of the woods at the little village of George's 
Mills. Here is the outlet of the pond, which falls 
over two or three saw-mill dams in its short course 
into Lake Sunapee. Sunapee is a large, wandering 
lake, presenting wherever you strike it abundant 
beauty of scenery. Bold, rocky headlands, covered 
with timber, jut out into it, and deep shadowy bays 
lie between them. I never yet have gotten to know- 
ing which way is up and which way is down the 
lake or how it stretches its chief length. Properly 
speaking, this principal inlet, the only one of any 
account at George's Mills, ought to mark the head 
of the lake ; but a long, narrow arm which goes far 
away to the eastward, along whose shores are villas 
and cottages, and which heads at Newbury, on the 
Concord and Claremont Railroad, always tempts 
me to consider that the upper end of the lake. 
However, there is no mistaking the outlet at Suna- 
pee Harbor, into which I drove before dinner. 
Here Sugar River, a roaring torrent (depending on 
how high they lift the gate-way of the dam which 
holds back the lake), plunges down a steep decliv- 
ity and finds the valley, through which it winds 
with clear and swift flow to Newport, and thence to 
Claremont and the Connecticut. 

We dined, and then decided to linger for the day. 



HIGHLANDS OF WESTERN NEW HAMPSHIRE 75 

I took a boat and rowed miles and miles along the 
shores ; landed here and there in golden forests or 
dark pine groves ; cast flies where bass, if not yet 
gone to their winter sleep, ought to be found ; took 
several that were not eight inches long, and were 
put back to go to bed and grow next year ; and so 
idled away the afternoon. The night came on cold. 

Next day we rode with the carriage-cover thrown 
back, to give us what warmth we might get from the 
sun shining through the still dense smoke. The 
road follows the river down to Newport ; but we did 
not stop in that thriving town, except to post letters 
and send some telegrams. Driving through it, we 
crossed the valley and took the hill road to Unity 
or Unitoga Springs. This is a lonesome but very 
charming country-place, where are mineral springs 
and an old hotel. We had the house to ourselves; 
and again the loveliness of the atmosphere, the rich 
foliage on the near hills, and the dust of gold smoke 
that made a canopy over us and hid the far views, 
all tempted us to stay. I spent the afternoon in 
the woods on the shore of a small lake a mile from 
the hotel. I went there to fish; but the only boats 
on the lake were full of water, and there was no 
spot on shore where I could get out a cast of more 
than twenty feet. At that I took some perch and 
small pickerel with the fly, but gave it up soon and 
wandered in the woods, rich in ferns and mosses. 

The next morning I sought and found a road, 



76 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

before unknown to me, by which to reach the Con- 
necticut Valley ; for it was Saturday, and I pro- 
posed that my horses and I should rest over Sun- 
day in the fine old village of Charlestown. It was 
only nineteen miles from Unity Springs, but in 
carriage travel we never, unless from some peculiar 
pressure, seek to accomplish great distances. The 
purpose is the enjoyment of the passing hours. I 
often linger along the road and cover only two or 
three or a half-dozen miles in a forenoon. So it was 
along this charming road. When I reached Charles- 
town I had driven only 108 miles from the Profile 
House in six days. Sometimes I drive 180 in the 
same time, taking the road leisurely and keeping the 
horses unwearied. I have known of gentlemen mak- 
ing 230 and 250 miles between Sunday and Sunday, 
with travelling carriages. But I have not known 
an instance of that kind which was not followed by 
the sickness of one or more of the horses that did it. 
The traveller by carriage must keep in mind that he 
is dependent on the good condition of his horses 
for continuous journeying, and must therefore care 
for them with unfailing watchfulness. It is more 
important that they should find a good stable than 
that he should find a good inn at night. He can 
put up with poor lodgings and food, and feel none 
the worse for it, whereas the dumb horse must suffer 
in a cold draughty stable, and may come out of it 
to sicken and fail along the road. 



THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 77 



IX 

THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 

The rector told me the story as we stood in 
front of the church after morning service. 

The church was almost hidden in a grove of 
maple-trees. It stood on the brow of a hill which 
overlooked one of the most lovely valleys on the 
sides of the Green Mountains. The road ran 
along the curve of the hill, in front of the church. 
The projection on which the church stood com- 
manded a view both up and down as well as across 
the valley, which lay two or three hundred feet be- 
low. The mountain sloped upward, mostly forest- 
covered, behind the church. Across the valley was 
a similar mountain. The pasture lots went up, here 
and there, almost to the summit ridges. The head 
of the valley was only a half-mile above. Down 
from a ravine came a noble stream of water, and 
before it fairly reached the sloping valley-land it 
received two similar streams, the three alike falling 
over rocky beds with much noise and white confu- 
sion of waters before they came together into the 
comparatively peaceful river which flowed down 



78 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

through rich meadow-lands and away oceanward. 
For howsoever wild and vexed and unrestrained be 
the youthful flow of these our mountain streams, 
one and all alike are sure in time to reach the deep 
and solemn rest of the great sea. 

Search the world over and you will find no land- 
scape scenery to surpass these valleys which open 
away eastward and westward from the Green Mount- 
ains. The one we were in was like many others I 
had seen that spring, only these three grand cas- 
cades at the head gave it an individuality of its 
own. 

On the lowland near the junction of the streams 
were a substantial stone house and a group of large 
and comfortable-looking barns and smaller build- 
ings. This was the old home of a man whom the 
clergyman described as a noble specimen of that 
humanity of which, in country as in city, noble 
specimens are rare enough to be conspicuous. 

" He feared God, but feared no man," was the 
summing-up sentence of the description. He was 
a man of wide influence, honored, respected, and 
loved, to whom for a half-century the old, and the 
young, too, had gone confidently for advice and 
help in joy and in trouble. For men and women 
need advice as often in one as in the other. It 
sometimes happens, in a community like this, that 
one man holds a commanding position. If he holds 
it steadily for a long time, so that he becomes the 



THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 79 

trusted counsellor and confidential friend of his 
neighbors, of all kinds, rich and poor, it is always 
certain that that man's life is governed by devout 
Christian principle. Others may be envied, imi- 
tated ; others may win respect and admiration ; but 
to become the confidential counsellor of all classes 
and ages, to be trusted with the troubles and in- 
vited into the happinesses of one's neighbors, it is 
essential to be loved as well as admired. And to 
be loved by all one must love all, not the good only, 
but the bad as well. And there never was, and 
never will be, a man who can love all classes of his 
neighbors and win their love in return, except that 
man have taken God for his example, whose spirit 
he has to some extent made part of his own. Rea- 
son, philosophy, experience, all affirm this. The 
idea that purity and peace, gentleness and affection, 
belong to what is called the religion of humanity, 
is disproved in the history of every nation, every 
city, every village and country community, among 
all peoples, civilized or savage, ancient or modern. 
There is no more exalted position among men 
than that which was held by this man, growing old 
among the people who loved and respected him, 
doing good and getting good in every year of his 
long life. The world in which he lived was small, 
but it was large enough to occupy the energies of 
any mind, however able. The patriarchal system 
has never been improved on by organizing men 



8o ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

into nations. One man in a country town can be 
worth as much to his age and to future ages, work- 
ing at home, as he could be in a statesman's chair. 
This man had been the friend and counsellor of 
statesmen. No one can measure the extent of his 
influence for good. Its limit was not geographical, 
for it extended far beyond the boundaries of this 
small globe. 

Much the clergyman told me of the personal and 
direct influence his old parishioner had exerted in 
the town, county, and State. But mostly he dwelt 
on the extreme beauty of his personal character and 
life, the delight with which the young people met 
him, his great grace of manner and voice, his devout 
and always cheerful bearing, his love of nature, his 
keen insight into character, his marvellous breadth 
of information and reading ; and lastly, for all else 
was prefatory to this, he told me of the picturesque 
death of his old parishioner, counsellor, father, and 
friend. 

All Friday and Saturday a north-east storm had 
raged among the hills; but Sunday morning the 
clouds went away before a stiif westerly breeze and 
the sun poured gold into the valley. The church 
was far away from any house — one of the old sites 
chosen in early days for people to come to from 
various valleys and hill-sides. 

The man who had charge of the church had made 
a fire early in the morning before he recognized 



to 



THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 8l 

the fact that the cold storm was over. Heavy mists 
had rushed through the maples until nine or ten 
o'clock, and then the warm fresh, May air took their 
place. The interior of the church was not pleasant. 
The air was close. Perhaps for the first time in 
his eighty years of living, the Squire (as he was 
called, though he had never held an office) became 
sensible of physical suffering. So at least they 
supposed who saw him several times lift his hand 
to his head, and at length go to the side door and 
open it a little way and sit down near it. After a 
while, to the surprise of all, he noiselessly slipped 
out of the door and did not come back. 

And now for the rest of the clergyman's story you 
will have to depend on imagination, or what we 
may intelligently believe who know and share the 
faith of the old man ; for there was no one out- 
side of the church to see him until all the people 
came out and saw him. 

He sought the fresh air of the May morning. 
There was not enough of it among the maples ; and 
perhaps he sought the sunshine with it. So he 
walked out of the grove towards the road - side, 
where his son - in - law, coming late and after the 
sheds were all occupied, had left his low carriage 
standing while he unhitched the traces and tied the 
horses in the grove. The empty carriage faced 
the south ; it was on the open green, and sitting 
in it one could see a vast prospect up and down 
6 



82 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

and across the valley. The sun shone in it and 
the wind blew over it. The old man took a seat 
in it, and before him lay the country in which he 
had lived and been loved, and far away yonder 
down the valley was a range of blue hills, beyond 
which was all the world and all the universe. 

Thus far all this was a very simple and common- 
place incident. Yes, but what seems the simple 
and commonplace may, by reason of what shall 
come next, be in reality the unintelligible and sub- 
lime. The old man had always lived close to an- 
other world. Many very dear ones had gone to it, 
and he had never ceased to regard them as living 
near him, nearer than if they lived in the flesh be- 
yond those blue mountains. He never thought of 
doubting the reality of their life. He never argued 
about it, for his faith was above reason. Out of 
the church came the sound of the people's voices 
singing, and to him it seemed as if the people who 
were under the grass behind the church as well as 
they who were in the church were together prais- 
ing God ; for he was, whether he knew it or not, 
very near if not indeed on the ground where one 
may hear the voices of both worlds. So he leaned 
back and looked off and listened, and the wind 
played with his white hair ; for he had left his hat 
in the church and sat bareheaded in the breeze 
and sunshine. Around him and above and in the 
valley and across on the other mountain-side be- 



THE TRIUMPHANT CHARIOT 83 

gan to gather appearances, if they were not reali- 
ties. And who can say they were not realities ? 
The white mists that were passing here and there 
among the trees near the summits, the snowy cata- 
racts descending and shouting as they descended — 
were they water-falls and mountain-mists, or were 
they white garments ? To your eye or mine they 
were the remains of last night's gloom and tempest ; 
but what were they to his eyes, looking now through 
all things which stop our vision into the fathomless 
depths which lie beyond ? To you or to me that 
tumultuous roar of the torrent was only the sound 
of many waters, the roar of streams filled full with 
heavy rains. So, perhaps, it was to him when he 
came out and climbed feebly into the carriage ; but 
after a little there is small doubt that he heard the 
sounds of other waters falling from other hills into 
other valleys, the rivers with whose cadences our 
rivers keep some though faint and stammering 
harmonies. For all voices of winds and water-falls 
on earth — howsoever profane be the voices of men 
— all musical and melodious sounds of nature are 
part of the eternal song, and we should recognize 
it if we understood that music, as, perhaps, some 
time we may. Doubtless he heard, and though yet 
a man old and very feeble, began to understand 
the language in which the universe sounds its joy 
and praise. For the bright look that rested on his 
human face bore witness that before it became 



84 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

mere dead dust it had heard the sounds and seen 
the forms of another world. How long he sat there 
and looked and listened from the hill-side no one 
knows. Perhaps it was to the close of the service 
in the church. And when he heard the sound of 
the organ, and the voices of the people singing 
" Holy, holy, holy," the voices of the wind in the 
trees, and the voices of the waters thundering down 
the mountain, and the voices of the innumerable 
host whom we never hear except when, like him, we 
come to the entrance of the other existence, all 
together sounded through earth and heaven, and 
he heard them all; and hearing, joined in the an- 
them with them. 

When the people came out of church they saw 
him sitting on the back seat of the carriage, his 
white hair fluttering in the wind, his hands folded 
on his lap, his eyes apparently looking across the 
valley at the opposite hill-side. A half-dozen peo- 
ple went to ask him if he was sick. They found 
him quite well ; better than he had ever been. It 
was not a triumphal car, nor a chariot of fire ; but 
he had gotten into it to go a short journey, and had 
gone, safely, happily. 



A DEAD LETTER 85 



X 

A DEAD LETTER 

One evening in May, many years ago, a man of 
an uncertain age, forty or fifty years old, perhaps, 
walked with a steady purposeful stride on this long 
road which leads winding through the primeval for- 
ests up the valley to a little settlement by a lake 
among the mountains. He carried nothing. He 
was a stranger. As now and then he passed a house 
the people wondered, and asked one another who 
he was. He reached the old church which stood 
at a crossing of the roads, the one going on up the 
valley, the other leading to right and to left over 
the hills. The minister's house was on the corner 
opposite to the church. The minister, a man in 
the prime of life, stood on the green in front of the 
church, looking over the stone-wall into the grave- 
yard. He was thinking how many joys and pains, 
virtues and sins, were hidden there. He turned and 
saw the stranger striding towards him, and greeted 
him with a pleasant " Good-evening." The reply 
was not gruff, but short in tone, " Good -evening," 
and the man walked on ; but his eye caught the 



86 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

horse -sheds in the rear of the church, and he 
stopped short, then sat down on the door-step. 

The minister strolled towards him and asked him 
if he was going to the village. " Not to-night," was 
the curt, trisyllabic answer. The minister was a 
man of much experience. He saw that there was 
here something out of the common run of human- 
ity in that neighborhood. " If you are not going 
farther you will want a night's shelter, unless you 
are going back again." 

" I s'pose there's no objection to my sleepin' in 
one of them sheds." 

" My house, over there, is more comfortable ; 
come over with me and get your supper, and I'll 
give you a bed." 

" I'm grateful for your offer, but I'd ruther sleep 
in the shed, and I don't need supper." 

The minister urged his invitation, but could get 
no reply. The stranger sat silent, not even looking 
up or answering with his eyes. At last the minis- 
ter gave him up and went home. He looked out in 
the twilight frequently, and saw the man sitting on 
the door-step. He went over and tried him again 
with pressure, but received no response. He some- 
how conceived the idea that the language used by 
the queer man was affected, and not natural ; that 
he assumed to be what he was not, an uneducated 
man. Perhaps it was so, perhaps not ; no one ever 
knew. For many years after that the stranger 



A DEAD LETTER 87 

lived in the valley, became one of the valley people, 
was known to every one, spoke to few, and used 
very brief sentences in such conversation as was 
necessary. He bought a tract of land, it could not 
be called a farm, lying on the side of the mountain 
and including a few acres of bottom land on the 
river. There were 100 acres in the tract, and he 
p.iid cash in bank notes, $80, for it. When the 
deed was made out, the village justice, who was a 
land-agent, asked him his name. He gave it 
promptly — Ben Layton. He built a log-house on 
his land. The people, not an aesthetic community, 
laughed at his selection of a site. It was up the 
mountain-side, on a projecting knoll, the front of 
which was a rocky precipice. The cabin stood in 
the edge of the forest. In front of it the ridge of 
the knoll was covered with low brush, mostly huckle- 
berry bushes. A mountain stream came down a 
ravine behind the cabin and descended swiftly at 
one side of the knoll. A rough pathway, in time 
worn by his use, led from the cabin across the 
brook and down by the watercourse to the few 
acres of meadow-land on the river bottom. A for- 
est road, little else than a logging road, among 
rocks and stumps, went from the meadow down 
two miles to the main road up the valley. From 
below you could see the cliff, and the low bushes 
covering the ridge, and the dark forest from which 
it projected, but you could not see the little cabin 



88 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

which stood under the trees. From the cabin door 
the view was one of unsurpassed beauty. The val- 
ley beneath, widening to hold a lovely lake two 
miles long, closing again where the mill and the 
store and the post-office and the half-dozen houses 
formed "the village," widened again beyond to the 
level where the church stood, and then went down- 
ward into immeasurable distance. The door opened 
to the west. When the sun was setting in June 
and July it went down in 4hat remote distance, and 
the glory that filled the valley was like the light 
coming earthward from the celestial city. 

Years went on. At first there was much curios- 
ity about this strange arrival ; but it passed. He 
became a recognized inhabitant. His strange char- 
acter was more a matter of imagination than of 
known fact ; for he seldom spoke to any one, and 
in those brief sentences which were necessary to 
his procuring the means of life he spoke as sensibly 
as any man in the valley. Oddly enough, he would 
sometimes exchange some little talk about the 
weather, or his health, or other commonplace sub- 
ject, with the minister, but with no one else. And 
the minister was the only man who ever went twice 
to the cabin on the cliff. He had a settled convic- 
tion that this man had a soul, not disturbed by any 
errancy of faculty, which was worth looking after. 
And he looked after it for thirty or more years, but 
confessed in the end that he had never found it. 



A DEAD LETTER 89 

To the people the cabin was simply " Ben's cab- 
in," and as years went along and young people came 
to exist who had not been there when he arrived, 
a stranger, he became Old Ben, a harmless semi- 
lunatic, w^ho raised potatoes on his bottom-land, 
killed and ate woodchucks and all kinds of beasts 
of the field and forest, fished a great deal, but most- 
ly wandered around in the woods and along the 
streams, silent and thoughtless. 

Was he without tliought? Who knows ? Some- 
where in the world perhaps there was one, perhaps 
there were many, who could have told what Ben 
had to think about. No one in the valley knew. 
He never read a newspaper or a book, never went 
to a public gathering, never voted, never was seen 
at church. He grew old. The minister grew old. 
All the people were growing older, many very old, 
as is the custom in city and country with all our 
family of man. 

It was six o'clock of a July evening. A group of 
a dozen or more men stood on the porch of the 
store wherein was the post-office. The semi-weekly 
mail had arrived, and this group was regular at that 
hour. The minister sat in his low buggy under the 
shadow of a great Balm of Gilead-tree. The doctor 
drove up in his buckboard and stopped by the side 
of the minister. This was the time when the group 
at the post-office exchanged the news of the neigh- 
borhood, which meant a section of country three 



90 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

miles down and five miles up the valley, and includ- 
ed scattered clearings on the lulls. The doctor, 
when he happened to be there, answered questions 
about the sick, and the intelligence he gave was 
carried in various directions, radiating to outlying 
homes, where all were sincerely interested in it. 

" Doctor," said a man whose home was three 
miles away, " I shouldn't wonder if somethin's the 
matter o' Old Ben. I ain't seen him now it's a 
week or more, and I ain't seen smoke coming out 
of his chimeney for two days." 

" Why haven't you gone up to see him ?" 

" Wall, it's somethin' of a climb, and a long way 
around, and Ben don't like company, and I've been 
purty busy hoein' potatoes, and I thought o' goin' 
up to-morrow." 

" You might better have gone up to-night instead 
of coming down here. Does any one know whether 
Ben has been down the valley lately ?" 

" I seen him, lemme see — it was Monday a week 
ago — he was fishin' on the big rock. Hain't any of 
you fellows seen him sence then ?" While they 
were, one and another, saying " No" to this query, 
the postmaster came to the door with a letter in 
his hand. 

" Here's a letter for Old Ben. What had I better 
do with it ?" The people closed around the post- 
master. Here was an incident. A letter to any 
one of them would have been a matter of general 



A DEAD LETTER 9 1 

interest, but a letter to Old Ben was a startling 
fact. 

" It's come at last," said one. 

" Yes, it's come at last," said another and an- 
other. 

"As long as I've been postmaster — and that's 
been how many years, boys ? — as long as I can re- 
member, Ben has come every Saturday and asked 
if there was a letter for him. Sometimes he came 
twice a week, sometimes every day for a while. 
There ought to be something important in it, and 
he hasn't been here now for more than a week. 
He's been waiting more than twenty years for that 
letter, and it's come at last." 

This constant application of Old Ben for a letter, 
persistent, though vain, for months and years, was 
a known fact to all the people ; but it had long been 
set down as only another indication of his lunacy. 
Before sunset pretty much every family in the valley 
was talking about it, and saying, " Old Ben's letter 
has come at last." 

The letter passed from hand to hand ; one and 
another wondered who had written it. The minis- 
ter and the doctor were conversing and had not 
heard the postmaster's questions. But they were 
talking about Ben. When the postmaster repeated 
his inquiry, the minister said : 

" Give me the letter. I will take it to him. I am 
going out to see him." 



92 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

The sun was just above the far horizon when 
the minister reached the end of the narrow rocky 
road on the bottom-land, and tied his horse under 
a rude cow-shed near the bars of the pasture lot. 
It was a good half-mile from this point, by the wild 
path up the side of a brawling stream, through 
primeval forest, to the level of Ben's cabin. The 
minister knew his way. He had been at Ben's 
cabin not a few times. There was no house or 
cabin or habitation of man within many miles that 
he had not visited often. But he had never been 
here at this hour. The sun had gone. A mass 
of clouds hung across the valley from mountain to 
mountain, and all were aglow with crimson light. 
The country below the arch of fire was lit with a 
golden lustre which came flooding up the valley 
from the clear sky on the horizon. Above all was 
crimson, below all was gold. Turning his back to 
the miraculous view, the minister struck the cabin 
door with his knuckles two or three times and 
waited. A robin in a tree near by sang out boldly. 
A thrush poured forth a flood of melody, and an- 
other lower down the hill answered him. No sound 
came from within the cabin. The minister knocked 
again and waited. While he was waiting he heard 
a step, and turning saw the doctor coming along 
the path around the corner of the cabin. He was 
not surprised. They two were in the habit of meet- 
ing on such errands at all hours of the day and night. 



A DEAD LETTER 93 

They went into the cabin. It was only one room, 
eighteen or twenty feet long and fifteen wide. All 
of one end was occupied by the heap of rough 
stone which formed the chimney. Along the side 
was a low, broad bench, which did duty for a bed. 
There was little furniture, but everything in the 
room was clean and neat. In, or on, the bed lay 
the tall form of a man, motionless. As the two 
approached him he made no sign. His eyes were 
open. 

" Is he dead ?" asked the minister. The doctor 
laid his hand on the man's forehead, and answered : 

" No, he is living yet ; but," he added, after a 
little, "he is near the end." 

The same thought was in the minds of the two 
who sat by the side of the bed : " Who is this man 
that lies here dying alone in the forest?" They 
had time to think, for the twilight passed into 
night, and dark night, with clouds and rising wind, 
and the trees began to utter strange sounds, but 
there was no sound from the lips of Old Ben. A 
whippoorwill suddenly called with his clear, rich 
voice from the peak of the cabin, and a dozen or 
more answered from the woods below. The sounds 
of nature are innumerable in the night-time in still 
weather, and when the wind blows the forest is 
filled with voices in a thousand tones. Some are syl- 
labic utterances, shouts, calls, and answers ; others, 
long notes of delight or of pain. It made the si- 



94- ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

lence of the cabin most solemn and impressive to 
hear the turmoil and tmnult in the outer world. 
And it was the more oppressive to the two watchers 
in that he who lay there dying held a secret on 
which the silence seemed to be placing a great 
black seal ; for, to say truth, they had within the 
past thirty years asked each other countless times, 
" Who is Old Ben ?" To the people not given to 
much thought the question had long since lost in- 
terest. To them, reading, scholarly men, it had 
continuous and increasing attraction as an unsolved 
problem. They asked it now, one of the other, 
with their eyes. 

" He will never get his letter after all," said the 
doctor, in a low voice. 

" What letter ?" The words came from the lips 
of the motionless man. Then a sudden flash of 
light illumined his face. They bent over him. 
"What letter.?" he said again. "Is there a letter 
for me V' 

" Give it to him," said the doctor. 

" Yes, Ben, I have a letter for you. It came by 
the mail to-night." 

" Give it to me, quick, quick, dominie, for she 
said — she said — ;" he tried to lift his hand, but 
failed. The light on his face became white, cold. 
After a while the light reappeared in his eyes. 
"The letter — she said — " he was murmuring rather 
than speaking, and they could hear no more, for the 



A DEAD LETTER 95 

wind thundered and the trees wailed and sobbed 
and shrieked. For one instant his eyes seized and 
devoured the letter which the minister held in his 
hand, but he was powerless to take it ; and a few 
moments later the end came, and he was dead. 

Their work was done. They lit their lanterns 
and went out, leaving the mystery behind them. 
The forest was never so black as in the contrast 
with their lights. The brook was a torrent, for 
heavy showers had been passing over. Even now, 
as they went cautiously down the narrow footway, 
they paused several times to listen to the reverber- 
ation of heavy thunder, or to recover eyesight lost 
in the dazzling brilliance of lightning. 

" He never got the letter after all," said the min- 
ister, as they reached the low cow-shed under which 
they had left their horses. " What shall we do with 
it?" 

In that part of the country in those days there 
was small thought or knowledge of the laws of in- 
heritance. The public administrator was unknown. 
The people buried Ben. When they brought him 
out of the cabin they left the door open. There 
was nothing in it which any one wanted to steal, 
and there was no one who had any interest in pre- 
serving it. 

The minister carried the letter back to the post- 
master. It lay a long time in his office, and again 
and again was brought out and handed around 



96 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

among the people. It was the central point of in- 
terest in that valley for months — a small folded bit 
of paper, concerning which every man and woman 
within five miles of the place of its deposit thought 
and talked and guessed and wondered. Then it 
went the way of dead letters. 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES 97 



XI 

EriTAPHS AND NAMES 

The frequency and the various conditions of 
country graveyards form a feature of New England 
landscape scenery peculiar to this country. You 
never see anything like it in any other country. It 
is, of course, common enough in Europe to find the 
old church surrounded by the church-yard. But 
our graveyards are very much more frequent with- 
out than with churches, or any buildings, in them ; 
and churches are far more numerous without than 
with graveyards near them. 

Most of the country graveyards are lonesome and 
mournful-looking places, often far away from any 
houses, frequently showing no indications of care 
nor any footprints of visitors. In and near the 
large villages one finds very beautiful cemeteries, 
demonstrating the existence of reverence for the 
place of final rest. But the lonesome burial-places 
that I pass along the road are for the most part 
open fields, with waving grass and golden-rod, and 
often thickets of brush, but without trees. This 
must not, however, be taken as evidence of forget- 
7 



98 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

fulness of the dead, or intentional neglect of their 
graves. It proceeds simply from the fact that no 
one has suggested to the people the idea of com- 
bining effort to make the graveyard a place of 
beauty as well as of repose. It is in fact part of 
that lack of education in love of beauty which pre- 
vails among laborious communities, with whom life 
is a very constant struggle, whose days are none 
too long for the earning of a livelihood. True, it 
needs but an instructor to teach such communities 
the utility and money value of beauty, and show 
how the labor of the farm may produce beauty with 
profit. Doubtless after some more generations the 
education will come. 

Meantime these desolate -looking burial-places 
contain abundant evidence of the refinement of 
mind which characterizes the country population; 
the deep sentiment which in human history accom- 
panies the highest civilization. For if you desire 
to find communities in the largest measure com- 
posed of true gentlemen and gentlewomen, you are 
not to seek them in cities, nor in that section of 
city population sometimes called " society," but 
among the hills, in the up-country, where lives have 
grown old and generations have succeeded genera- 
tions, far removed from the ambitions, the rivalries, 
the passionate collisions of the cities. Here are 
very kindly hearts, rejoicing in one another's pros- 
perities, sympathetic one with another's troubles. 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES 99 

Here slander finds no encouragement and gossip 
has no life. Here no one tells lies about another, 
man or woman, and when men or women sin, as 
alas ! they sometimes do everywhere, others do not 
enjoy talking about it, but are sorry and silent. 

Doubtless there are evil-minded people in the 
country. Their number is increasing as railways 
bring the population into closer contact with crowd- 
ed communities. But there remain, here and there, 
isolated tracts of country in which a great deal of 
the old purity of life and whole-souled love of neigh- 
bors yet prevails. If you know what that means, 
what it was a few years ago all over the north 
country, you cannot look at one of these road-side 
graveyards without recalling the scene which has 
been visible here, as each one of these mounds was 
heaped up. Then all the people from miles around 
came to the funeral, and whether it were old man 
or boy, babe girl or matron, no king had ever more 
royal burial, for none was ever laid in vault or 
ground with more solemn, loving, lamenting attend- 
ance. 

I have often copied and printed epitaphs from 
these graveyards, which however rude or uncouth in 
expression, are nevertheless honest epitaphs. There 
is no introduction of the rivalries of society into 
these cemeteries. Simple, unpretentious headstones 
are here, only intended as marks of the separate 
graves, and the inscriptions are in plain letters, 



lOO ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

affectionate memorials. It is often interesting to 
see how frequently in the same graveyard the same 
epitaph is repeated. When first put on a stone it 
has attracted the eye and pleased the mind, and one 
and another has adopted it as just the expression 
of his or her feeling, and so it has been used on 
stone after stone. It is not uncommon to find 
stones which may indicate either the lack of a 
stone-cutter in the country, or the poverty which 
forbade employing one. These are home-made 
stones, and in their rude simplicity they are very 
eloquent, since you can but picture to yourself the 
survivor, in a solitary home, working slowly and 
patiently to carve the gravestone of the lamented 
dead. Here is an example. I found it in a grave- 
yard in the western part of the town of Putney in 
Vermont. Type will not reproduce the rudeness 
of the lettering, but will exhibit the patience of 
the unskilled fingers which cut the characters deep 
in red sandstone : 

H E R EL I E 
S T H E R E 
M E N S O F 
M O S E SKE 
RRWHODIE 
DNOVEMBER 
THE5IN1813 
AGED65 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES lOI 

Aside from the indications of human emotion 
which these records furnish in ancient as in modern 
cemeteries, they contain many curiosities of htera- 
ture. 

Mistakes in spelUng, which are frequent, are of 
course the fault of the stone-cutter. It certainly 
was his fault in the case of a stone in the noble 
cemetery at Charlestown, N. H., whereon the in- 
scription was clearly not intended to suggest the 
penance to which in old times some were occasion- 
ally addicted. The epitaph ends thus : 

"His wayes were wayes of pleasantness 
And all his paths were pease." 

There is a common old epitaph, found frequently 
in graveyards in England as well as in America, in 
one or another form. In that same graveyard at 
Putney I found it in this form : 

" Behold my grave as you pass by 
As you are liveing so once was I ; 
Death suddenly took hold on me 
And so will be the case with thee." 

In a graveyard by the road-side in Charlemont, 
Mass., I found a variation, the first lines being: 

" Come all young people as you pass by, 
As you are now so," etc. 

In that Charlemont burial-place I copied from 



I02 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

the grave of Mr. Nathaniel Upton, who died in 
1829, this short, sharp statement : 

" Here lies my friend 
Till time shall end." 

Manchester in Vermont, one of the most beauti- 
ful villages in the world, has a cemetery which, 
like the village, may claim superior beauty to almost 
any other in the north country. Wandering through 
it, I copied this inscription from a stone marking 
the graves of three children, who died in the years 
1821, 1823, and 1824 : 

" Here in the dust 3 babes we 
Sleep by our Father here 

our Mother Brothers 
Sisters dear have left us 

alone to moulder 

here " 

And another, over a young wife, only eighteen 
years old, who died in 18 10. 

" Mourn not for me 
Wipe of!' the crystal tear 
Your allotted portion be 
Like mine upon a bier. 
Go search the earth around 
Regard well your behaveer 
To Jesus Christ you're bound 
He is your only Saviour." 

At Fayetteville in Vermont I strolled into the 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES IO3 

old graveyard, and copied here and there an in- 
scription. 

On one stone I found this : 

"Now, little James has gone to rest 
With Eliza Ann among the blest. 
Aside by side their bodies lay. 
Till the great resurrection day." 

On a stone by the side of the above : 

"Oh, little Lavina she has gone 
To James and Charles and Eliza Ann. 
Arm in arm they walk above, 
Singing the Redeemer's love." 

On a somewhat large monument was a photo- 
graph, or perhaps it was a daguerreotype, set deep 
in the stone, and under it the familiar old epitaph 
before mentioned, with, however, a stanza added 
which I do not remember to have seen elsewhere: 

"Behold my friends as you pass by," etc. 

"What thou art reading o'er my bones 
I've often read on other stones. 
And others soon shall read of thee 
What thou art reading now of me." 

There is a quaint force in this, which is from an 
1825 stone at Pittsfield, N. H. : 

"Ah soon we must persue 
This soul so lately fled 
And soon of you tl;ey may say too 
Ah such an one is dead." 



I04 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

And Oil another stone in the same yard I found 
this brief sentence : 

"Death is a debt to nature due 
I've paid the debt, and so must you." 

Sometimes I find hints of tragedies or romances 
in the quiet up-country Uves which have found 
final peace under the stones. As I drove by a 
little cemetery in Goshen, I stopped the horses 
and read from the carriage an inscription which 
has given me food for a thousand imaginings since. 
I wondered what could have been the story of that 
life which was thus published on the road-side, mani- 
festly with intent that every passer-by should read. 
I even had the curiosity to inquire, but found no 
one who remembered the events alluded to. It was 
the grave of a girl of seventeen, and the epitaph was 

this; 

' ' Dearly beloved while on earth — 
Deeply lamented at death — 
Borne down by two cruel oppressors — 
Distracted and dead." 

Peace be with the child, whoever she was and 
whatever her sorrow! It was a lonely graveyard, 
far away from any village, and not near any house, 
but there was a goodly company of the sleepers 
near her on the hill-side going up from the road, 
and she is not alone in her rest, and will not be 
alone in the morning. 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES 105 

Sometimes I have found very touching evidences 
of the grief that comes to all human hearts alike, 
in city and country, in Christian and pagan lands. 
There is an affectation of sorrow in some tombstone 
literature, but I don't think any one will imagine 
there was not the outburst of a mother's heart in 
the words that were on the tombstone of the child 
named Coral. She was but fourteen years in this 
country, and some one — it could have been but one 
— when she went suddenly away, summed up her 
agony in the words on the stone, "My dearest love, 
my dearest love !" In a city cemetery we do not 
fancy that the publication of one's private grief 
seems in good taste even on a memorial stone. But 
no one can find fault with any inscription which 
bears evidence that it is uttered, not to the livins: 
who remain, but to the dead loved one who has 
gone on. Such inscriptions properly dedicate me- 
morial stones. 

Some graveyards, full of the graves of the old- 
time folks, are abandoned as if forgotten. At Fran- 
cestown, N. H., I found such a place. The stones 
were lying or leaning down in all directions. It 
was difficult to read the inscriptions. Brush and 
weeds concealed graves and stones. Here are some 
lines from the headstone of Mr. Isaac Brewster, who 
died in 1782 : 

"Happy the company that's gone 
From cross to crown, from thrall to throne 



I06 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

How loud they sing upon the shore 
To which they sailed in heart before.'' 

Driving up the road from Keene, N. H., to Drews- 
ville, I readied a little road-side inn in the town of 
Surry, at about the time to feed my horses. As I 
sat on the front steps of the inn, the scene, in the 
noon of a bright October day, was not exhilarating. 
There was no village. Across the broad road was 
a church. The front platform was rotted, and the 
broken plank, some standing on end, made it un- 
necessary to ask if it was abandoned. There was 
a graveyard a little way from it, a blacksmith's shop, 
and a building, half town-hall and half grocery-store, 
standing between. The graveyard, although appar- 
ently not in use, was evidently cared for. It was 
neat and in good order. Perhaps the church is 
deserted because the population is less. Whatever 
be the reason, I have rarely found a country grave- 
yard which was better worth visiting. 

There was a very large group of graves of one 
family, the name varying, usually Darte, sometimes 
Dort, sometimes Dart, and among them Eli, Elihu, 
and Eliphalet. One of the little girls was named 
Azubah. Mr. Nathaniel Darte died long ago at 66. 
There was a blank on the stone where the year of 
his death should have been. His headstone said: 

"Dear friends don't mourn for me nor weep; 
I am not dead, but here do sleep. 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES I07 

And here I must and shall remain 
Till Christ does raise me up again." 

Doubtless he was a resolute man, in death as in 
life. Mrs. Deborah Darte, his wife, died in 1773, 
only twenty-eight years old. She says : 

"Friends retire; prepared be 
When God shall call to follow me." 

When Mrs. Darte died she left two little dauo;h- 
ters. Avis and Eunice. This we know from their 
graves, close by. They both grew up. Avis married 
Asa Holmes, and in 1791, a young wife in her twen- 
ty-second year, "fell a victim to death." The er- 
rors in spelling on her tombstone must be charged 
to the stone-cutter of the day. This is the epitaph : 

"Altho' I sleep in death awhile, 
Beneath this barron sod, 
Ere long I hope to rise and smile. 
To meet my savour God." 

Little Avis and Eunice grew to womanhood dur- 
ing the trying times of the Revolutionary War, but 
did not live to see the good times of this nineteenth 
century. For Eunice, who was only two years old 
when her mother died. Avis being four, died unmar- 
ried a few months after her sister in 1 791, in her 
twentieth year. Mrs. Eunice the headstone calls her, 
that is. Mistress Eunice. I fancy she had received 
this title, given in those days to maiden ladies, but 



Io8 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

not often to those as young as she, because she had 
become the head of her surviving father's house- 
hold. She was doubtless a fair New England maid- 
en, lovely and loved. Was it a lover who called her 
"friend," in her epitaph? Or was it her father? 
For as we will see presently the word "friend " had 
endearing associations in that locality, and a father 
might apply it to a daughter or a husband to a wife, 
according to modern French usage. Here is her 
epitaph, literally : 

" Stop gentle youth and drop a tear, 
For my true friend lies buried here. 
She once was innacently gay, 
But now a lifeless lump of clay. 
Then pity my sad overthrow. 
Nor set your heart on things below." 

When Ruel Mack died in 1812 he left this assur- 
ance, as we find it carved over him : 

"Mourn not for me, nor thus reflect, 
But all your sighs and tears suppress, 
Since God has promised to protect 
The widow and the fatherless." 

Mr. Woolston Brockway, who died in 1789, in the 
seventy -eighth year of his age, was verily one of 
the New Hampshire fathers. The stone record 
says : " He left a widow and eighty-seven children, 
grand and great-grandchildren." Of John Brock- 
way, who died in 1799, ^^ ^^ ^^^^ • 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES 109 

"He lived a friend to all mankind 
And died in hopeful peace of mind." 

On the headstone of Mrs. Lucina Willcox, who 
died in 1800, is a version of a familiar old epitaph, 
before mentioned, whose peculiarity I italicize : 

"Death is a debt by nature due, 
I've paid my shot and so must you." 

Theodosha, wife of Edmund Wetherbee, died in 
1806 at twenty-one years of age, and her husband 
thus laments : 

"Why do I mourn beneath the cross? 
Why do I thus repine 
If God be pleased to take away 
A lovely friend of mine." 

In 1802, when Benjamin Isham was laid in the 
ground, they carved this over him : 

"Pray don't lement when death is sent, 

Nor fill a w^atery eye ; 
It was decreed to Adam's seed 
All that are born must die." 

John Marvin went away triumphantly in 1807, a 
soldier of the church militant who fell in the battle. 
There is the ring of a clarion in his epitaph. If you 
do not think so, go and read it as I read it in a 
golden October day, with a north-west wind rush- 
ing over the hills and sweeping the yellow maple- 
leaves in wild and musical whirls around you in 



no ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

that otherwise silent burial-place, while above you 
is the blue sky into which so many have looked 
from these hills and valleys, and looking have gone 
to meet their leader : 

"Death, thou hast conquered me — 
I, by thy darts, am slain ; 
But Christ has conquered thee, 
And I shall rise again." 

I lingered two hours in this lonesome burial-place, 
copying quaint epitaphs : those of the Reverend 
Zebulon Streeter and Tabitha, his consort, who died 
in the early part of the centur}^, of Abia Grain, of 
Colonel William Bond, of Simon Baxter, and a num- 
ber more which are in my note-book. Let it suffice 
to add only that of Mr. John Redding, who died in 
1814. It is very homely : 

"The widow mourns the loss of a husband near, 
The children of a parent dear ; 
But still one comfort does remain. 
The hopes that our loss is his infinite gain." 

As I was coming out of the ground I was startled 
at sight of a tall, white stone, and the legend, " Ich- 
abod Grain died Oct. 14, 1866, se. 82 years and 10 
months." The spelling was not that of Geoffrey 
Grayon, but by the side of this stone was another, 
whereon I read : " Fanny, wife of Ichabod Grane, 
died March 22, 1842, ae. 53." 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES III 

There is an interesting old cemetery at Norwich 
in Vermont, where I passed a rainy Sunday. 

The stones of a hundred and more years ago are 
going rapidly to decay; many inscriptions are al- 
ready lost past all recovery ; parts of others are 
gone. I hope there is a local historical or other 
society which has preserved accurate copies of 
these old records. They will always be of inesti- 
mable value, not alone to descendants of those who 
lie here, but to local and general historians. 

It was raining, and the yellow grass was high 
and wet ; but I forgot the dismal weather as I went 
on from one to another old stone, and kneeling in 
the grass studied out, sometimes copying, the in- 
scriptions. I found several names of women, un- 
common though none entirely new to me, such as 
Mindwell, Thankful, Salla, Alba, Candace. 

Here is an inscription from an old stone : 

"In memory of Mr. Nathaniel Hatch who died with the 
small pox at Charlestown N. H. July 3, 1776 aged (blank) 
years. His bones were accidentally found in 18 10 by men to 
work on a turnpike between Charlestown and Walpole and 
deposited at this place by the desire of his son Oliver Hatch 
of this town. 

Let not the dead forgotten lie 

Lest men forgit that they must die." 

That stone speaks of the terror which accompa- 
nied the disease when it appeared at Number Four 
(the ancient name of Charlestown), the hasty, un- 



112 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

marked burial, not in the general graveyard. It 
may suggest, too, that Americans had many sub- 
jects of personal thought and work and worry on 
the 4th of July, 1776. 

The small stone at the grave of Mariah Hatch, 
who died in 1802, after living five weeks, gave op- 
portunity to some one to defy orthography and or- 
thodoxy and the doctrine of original sin, in this epi- 
taph : 

" Beneth a sleeping infant lies 
To earth her body's lent, 
More glorious she'll hereafter rise 
Though not more inocent." 

The freedom of the country stone-cutter from all 
laws of calligraphy and orthography is exhibited in 
an inscription which I copy line for line : 

" In memory of Mrs Susannah 
wife of Ensign Elisha Burton 
who died in full assurance 
of a Beter life April 27 1775 
in ye 23d Year of her Age she 
was an Obliging wife a tender 
Mother & a Sincear'Christion 
born From above she paied 
her viset here & then Retorned 
to Dwell with saints on high 
where she is Ceased From 
Every ancious Care & Joined ye 
Geniral Chorus of ye Joy " 

Evidently the last word should have been *' sky." 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES I13 

There is something wortli your philosophic study- 
in these graves, and in graves which you may find 
scattered all over the world, which you may classify 
as you classify birds and fish and mammals and 
flowers, placing them together. All these people 
died in one faith ; all are of one family. It strikes 
me always as very odd, very unscientific, for men 
to neglect great moral facts, and great physical 
facts which seem to be consequences of moral facts. 
Thousands of people swarming together periodical- 
ly towards central points, called places of worship, 
are as distinctly phenomena as any other physical 
occurrences in this world. The impelling causes, 
if natural, demand the highest attention of the phi- 
losopher. If they are not natural, then they are 
supernatural, and annihilate many of the specula- 
tions of the small philosophers of our day. 

What higher philosophy is there ? It is written, 
in ill-spelled phrases but in words of wonder, all 
over these rude stones in the up-country grave- 
yards. " You can't read it,'' do you say ? Come, 
and I will show it to you in plain letters of modern 
cutting. For as the rain fell steadily, and the 
clouds dragged down lower on the valley, and it 
grew colder and colder, I was about to come away 
from the old graveyard, when I saw the dense, dark 
mass of a low spruce bending its branches heavy 
with wet down to the ground. Parting the branch- 
es, I found a brown stone, surmounted by a cross, 
8 



114 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



and read the summing up of that sublime faith 
which makes an old New England graveyard to be 
holy land. " O Jesu qui mihi crucifixus es in 

TE SPERAVI." 

An interesting subject of thought is found in the 
Christian names which have been given to children, 
borne through longer or shorter lives, and finally 
carved on gravestones. Whence came some of 
these names, especially as names given to female 
children ? Here are a few out of many which I 
have copied in various burial-places along the 
roads. Some are Scriptural, varied in spelling, 
some noteworthy only for the spelling : 



Vesta, 


Smilinda, 


Bezaleed, 


Madona, 


Theodate, 


Phileena, 


Imagene, 


Mitty, 


Asenath, 


Sabrisal, 


Rozill, 


Resolved, 


Alanette, 


Lima, 


Comfort, 


Rocksena, 


Orlo, 


Romanzo, 


Ora, 


Elmon, 


Theda, 


Phene, 


Ede, 


Diademia, 


Arozina, 


Irena, 


Coral. 



While on this subject of names of the dead, here 
is an illustration of names now in use by the living. 
In a village inn in New Hampshire I found the 
printed catalogue of a school located there, and 
copied in my note -book the following Christian 
names of young lady students : 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES ] 

Myrtie loline. Mary Etta. 

Una Gertrude. Margaret Marilla. 

Mary Adella. Lora Eliza. 

Lois Ella. Franca Lydia. 

Corrie Elbra. Fannie Mae. 

Daisy Sarah. Minnie Etta. 

Hattie Rose Pearl. Lizzie Estelle. 

Myrtie Kate. Mary Loraine. 

Florence Genevra. Bernette Samantha. 



Here is an interesting study. Doubtless in each 
family there was a satisfactory reason for the name 
given to the child, however strange the names ap- 
pear when brought together in a catalogue. Fre- 
quently a mother desires to perpetuate in her daugh- 
ter the name of the father, grandfather, or other 
male relative. In such cases names of men are 
slightly transformed to become feminine in sound. 
Several times I have been told by a mother that she 
had named her child from a character in a book 
which she had read, and that not liking the name 
as found, she had altered it a little. Often a young 
mother, full of joy and love, gives her baby the name 
of a flower. It is not often that parents, in naming 
children, take into thought the possible maturity and 
old age of the child, sent on in life v/ith a label that 
cannot be well effaced. In a Vermont cemetery is 
the grave of a child who lived two years, till 1824, 
weighted with the name Orsamealius Almeron. 



Il6 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

Turning over an English publication recently, I 
read a note concerning a person who died a long 
while ago. The writer, to verify his accuracy as to 
the date of the person's death, stated that his coffin- 
plate is preserved in the family residence. I do not 
know whether this indicates a custom to any extent 
prevalent in England, of preserving coffin-plates in- 
stead of burying them with the dead. It may be 
only an accidental preservation. But I am sure it 
is not generally known that such a custom has long 
prevailed in many parts of New England. In car- 
riage travel I have frequently found the custom in 
practice. I once stopped for dinner at a farm-house 
and inn, in a village in Connecticut. We waited 
awhile in the little parlor, which was filled with 
family treasures in the way of curious and pretty 
things on shelves and pictures on the walls. Among 
the latter, framed separately under glass and hang- 
ing in different parts of the room, were three plain 
silver coffin-plates, engraved in the usual way with 
the names, ages, and dates of death of members of 
the family. This was the first instance in my ex- 
perience of this custom, which, I learned, was com- 
mon in the neighborhood. Afterwards I met with 
the same custom in various parts of other New 
England States, and it is quite likely that it prevails 
elsewhere in the country. 

Opening a drawer in my library, I happened on 
some small wooden tablets which I found many 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES II7 

years ago in Egypt. One of them, for example, is 
about four and a half inches long by three and a 
quarter inches wide. Notches are cut in the sides 
near one end, which is also perforated with a round 
hole. This was for a string. On one side of the 
tablet is carved in deep, rude letters, a Greek in- 
inscription-. I>ai)a7rodepog Krl KuXerog er fx : " Sara- 
poderos Kti, son of Kales, aged 48." 

The same words are written in ink on the other 
side of the wood. Here is the close counterpart, 
1800 years ago, of the modern cofhn plate. For 
these wooden tags were attached to the mummied 
bodies of the dead, as records to go with them to 
the burial. 

Every work of art is as much an embodiment of 
thoughts as a written sentence or a book. To look 
at works of art and express opinions as to their 
merit or demerit, to criticise them, is trifling work 
of little value. To read works of art as historical 
and personal records is the business of the art stu- 
dent. Here is a remarkable series of works of art, 
made by men in remotely separated periods, which 
evidently spring from one and the same motive. 
While we say at once that here is an indication, 
slight but noteworthy, of the sameness of ancient 
and modern humanity, we are nevertheless some- 
what in the dark as to this one common motive. 
What is it ? We have similar, though not identical, 
works in gravestones and monumental inscriptions. 



Il8 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

I do not speak of the marking by inscriptions of 
the resting-places of the dead. That is more easily 
accounted for. But why this custom of the ages, 
pagan and Christian, of placing with the dead the 
record of how many years he or she had lived ? 

In the vast numbers of ancient mortuary inscrip- 
tions which we possess, this record is of constant 
occurrence. Aurell\ duldsswia filia quce de sceatlo 
recessit vixit ann. xv., m. iiil Antimio vixit annis 
lxx. Julia Procilla vixit ann. xix. Innumerable 
examples like these occur, especially in early Chris- 
tian times. The phrase, "lived so many years," is 
the common, often the only, inscription accompany- 
ing the name. Often the length of the lifetime is 
stated even to months and days. Why this custom ? 

I do not attempt to answer the question. It is 
easy to find reasons for epitaphs in general. They 
are various, under various circumstances. Some, 
many, are importunate appeals to the living for 
sympathy in sorrow. Some are designed to perpet- 
uate loved or honored memories. Not a few which 
speak passionate grief are but sounding phrases, 
published to deceive the people into believing in a 
sorrow which does not exist. Many are devised as 
sermons to the active world, and many are placed 
only in obedience to existing custom. But I cannot 
see clearly what has been the constant motive of 
survivors in burying their dead with the statement 
that he or she had lived so many years and months 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES IIQ 

and days. Purposes of identification do not ac- 
count for it satisfactorily. 

Professor A. C. Merriam, in a monograph upon 
the Egyptian tags, says that of the small number 
known there are two classes, one class evidently 
used to direct transportation of the body from the 
place of death or of embalmment to that of entomb- 
ment. He gives an example of this kind of tag, 
which reminds us of the address of a modern ex- 
press package : " To Diospolis ; Pamontis, son of 
Tapmontis ; from Pandaroi." The other class, to 
which mine belong, went into the tomb attached to 
the body. 

These little wooden tags are objects of no small 
interest. They are probably not older than the be- 
ginning of the Christian Era— perhaps belong to 
the second century. They speak a mystery, the 
mystery I have already indicated. Whatever the 
motive be of recording the age of the dead, it is 
certain that there has always been a prevalent idea 
among men which has led to the placing with the 
dead sometimes records, sometimes personal ob- 
jects. In countless cases we know that this idea 
has been an avowed belief in the immortality of 
the soul, and the added faith in a resurrection. 
Has a like faith, sometimes so faint as to be un- 
confessed, led to the custom in all cases ? Did 
those who buried the son of Kales follow him in 
vague imagination to the world of spirit, and thus, 



I20 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

almost unconsciously, regard his life as continuous, 
unbroken, while they thought of this life in the 
body as only a section off from the beginning of 
the endless continuity? Is there in all these in- 
scriptions an eloquence which those who made 
them did not clearly recognize ; which would be 
made plain by adding the word "here?" — ''Julia 
Procilla lived here nineteen years." If that were 
the inscription, or if that be the sense in which it 
was carved, then it ceases to be a rnere statement 
of fact, and rises to the highest rank as a simple 
and powerful epitaph. And it is quite probable 
that on Christian graves this is the true intent in 
the use of the word vixit — lived. 

Was Saraj^oderos one of the Christians of the 
Church of St, Mark ? Was this tablet-tag intended 
to tell the Arab of later ages who should rob his 
grave, and me and all others to whom the inscrip- 
tion should come, that he passed the first forty- 
eight years of his existence here, in what men call 
" living," and then went to the other living, where 
he now is and will be forever ? 

That common epitaph: 

"As you are now, so once was I, 
As I am now so you must be — " 

brought to mind an ancient inscription said to be 
found on a Roman tablet at Naples, ''Ftii non sum : 
est is non eritis : nemo immortalise 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES 121 

The similarity and the immeasurable difference 
between the two epitaphs is manifest Hie phi- 
losophy is in comparing the human minds, 2000 
years apart, which inscribed them on the tomb of 
the dead. In both the idea is a message, a voice, 
from the dead to the living. In both is the sad 
ring of human consciousness of brief existence, 
universal certainty of the close of this life. But 
while the ancient ended his words with the pro- 
foundly gloomy "no one is immortal," the modern 
closed his with the assurance of another life and 
the words "follow me." 

In no custom of men is there more evidence of 
the community of mind, the sameness of qualities 
in the soul, than in the custom of placing epitaphs 
over the dead. Nor can we, I think, find in any 
literature more interesting illustration of the iden 
tity of the race in all ages. 

There are ancient epitaphs which are identical 
in sentiment with hundreds to be found in New 
England and Old England graveyards. My notes 
contain many such. It is common enough in our 
time for parents to record in stone their grief, as if 
demanding sympathy in their affliction from even 
strangers, and the passers-by of future times. " My 
darling, my darling," were four words which I 
copied from a child's gravestone one day, "Our 
dear little one," from another; scores of like ex- 
pressions you are familiar with. How like the sen- 



122 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

timent to that of ancient parents. At Aquileia, 
ages ago, Aurelius and Prima, father and mother, 
made a tomb for their Uttle AureUa, named doubt- 
less for her father, and wrote on it ''Aurelice, animce. 
dukissimcB : quce vixit hi pace anfi, IIII. men. VI. 
diebus XXIIir 

They loved that "'sweetest soul." " She lived 
in peace," for they had made home peaceful, and 
she had brought peace with her in the household. 
They counted in memory every short year of the 
four, every moon of the six, and they treasured 
with devout love each hour of the twenty -three 
days which were last in the short life of their joy. 
Many a modern father and mother have knowl- 
edge of the emotion which led them to carve this 
epitaph. 

And that custom of recording even the days of a 
beloved life, ancient and modern, on innumerable 
stones, reminds me, in passing, of an inscription at 
Rome which went still further, thus : ''Vix, Ann. 
XIX., M. II., D. IX.: horas scit neino "— " She lived 
nineteen years, two months, nine days, hours no 
one knoweth." 

Not alone parents to children, but husbands and 
wives to one another, and children to parents, placed 
in ancient as in modern times, memorials of affec- 
tion and respect, carved on stone for perpetuation. 
At Naples Proculus and Procillanus made a monu- 
ment to Marcia, '' Matri Sanctissimcs'^ — "their most 



EPITAPHS AND NAMES 1 23 

holy mother." Somewhere, I forget where, a Ro- 
man husband said of his wife, on her gravestone, 
" Nil wiquavi peccavit, nisi quod inortiia est'' — " She 
never did a wrong, except that she died." 

It is very rare indeed to find on a modern tomb- 
stone a doubt of immortahty. Once I copied an 
epitaph in which occurred the distinct assertion 
that the man who lay there believed in no God. 
Whether he ordered the record, or another placed 
it there without direction, I know not. I have a 
note of a Roman epitaph, " Vixi et ultra vitam nihil 
crediiW — "I have lived, and I believed in nothing 
beyond this life." Another of two " most sad " 
parents over a loved child expressed despairing 
grief in terms of bitterness : " We are cheated in 
our votive offerings; we are deceived by time, and 
death laughs at all our carefulness : Anxious life 
comes to nothing." 



124 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



XII 
FINDING NEW COUNTRY 

Leaving Franconia one may drive north or south, 
as he pleases, until well away from the high mount- 
ains, and then take such direction as may tempt 
him. A mao;niticent drive is through Bethlehem, 
Whitefield, Groveton, North Stratford, to Cole- 
brook, which is on the upper Connecticut River; 
thence eastward across the State through Dixville 
Notch to Errol on the Androscoggin ; thence along 
the west side of Lake Umbagog to Upton, and 
down the Bear River Notch to Bethel m Maine. 
This drive, easily accomplished in a week, is full 
of delights. It is in large part through wild coun- 
try, but the roads are in general better than in the 
more southern country. 

Southward from the Profile House the road fol- 
lows the Pemigewasset River and valley to Plym- 
outh, some thirty miles. The traveller going tow- 
ards home in Massachusetts or elsewhere in the 
lower country, may follow the river road to Bris- 
tol and Franklin Falls, and then go down the 
bank of the Merrimac through Concord. Or he 



FINDING NEW COUNTRY 1 25 

may take a route through the middle of the State, 
over highland country, or he may cross the State 
to the Connecticut valley, and go southward along 
that river. 

If in leaving the mountain country he desires to 
go nowhere in particular, only to wander along the 
roads, he can do no better than to drive into north- 
ern Vermont. The direct route from Franconia is 
through Littleton, and, crossing the Connecticut at 
Waterford, to St. Johnsbury. 

By way of finding new country, I drove from 
Franconia to Lancaster in New Hampshire. 

From Lancaster we drove across the Connecticut 
into Vermont, and down the river. We did not 
start until afternoon, thinking not to go beyond 
Lunenberg Heights. That little village stands on 
a hill, with a grand view of the Franconia and White 
Mountain ranges, the valley of the Connecticut ly- 
ing some four or six hundred feet below, in the 
foreground of the landscape. The air was smoky, 
and we could not get all the extent of this grand 
outlook. As the afternoon was not far advanced, 
I decided to go on westward. 

If you will look at a map you will see that Lunen- 
berg lies about forty miles south of the Canada line, 
and due east of St. Johnsbury. Going northward 
in Vermont you can follow up the valley of the 
Connecticut to the Canada line by a road along the 
river, or you can follow up the valley of the Pas- 



126 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

sumpsic River, from St. Johnsbury, and diverging 
at West Burke, go north along the eastern side of 
Mount Annanance (on Lake Willoughby) to Island 
Pond, and thence on to Canada. Between these 
two routes there is no northward route through this 
north-eastern part of Vermont. Nor is there any 
practicable road from east to west across any part 
of this section. The road I was driving that after- 
noon, from Lancaster to St. Johnsbury, is the most 
northern road in Vermont, going west from the 
Connecticut River, across this part of the State. 
There was a poor road once along the track of the 
Grand Trunk rail from North Stratford to Island 
Pond, but it has not been kept up as a summer 
road, and is not safe. There is a mountain road 
across from Guildhall to Burke, but it is so rough 
that only necessity should lead any one over it 
vi^ith a light wagon. I have only to add that I do 
not recommend this road from Lunenberg to St. 
Johnsbury. 

Two miles out from Lunenberg the road became 
narrow, and deep mud holes and deeper dry holes 
were frequent. Then it became rough and rocky. 
This is not an untravelled road. It is in constant 
use. We met fifteen vehicles — heavy farm wagons, 
covered buggies, and others — and the meeting in 
narrow passes, among rocks or mud holes, was se- 
rious business. I suppose the condition of this 
road is due to the system of road-making by town 



FINDING NEW COUNTRY 1 27 

tax. Lunenberg is not a rich town, is sparsely set- 
tled, and this road, the most northerly cross-road 
from St. Johnsbury to the Connecticut, is used 
more by non-residents than residents. It presents 
a strong argument for a new system of public 
roads used by the public. When the States utilize 
State prison and county jail labor on road-making 
they will have better roads, no dispute with labor 
societies about prison labor, increase the taxable 
value of farm property, and add to the intelligence 
and home -loving character of the population, as 
well as add to the population. Railroads have 
cursed and depopulated Northern New England. 
Good wagon roads are needed for the restoration 
of the country. What is true of this part of the 
country is true in many other States of the Union. 
Three hours of the golden afternoon it took me 
to accomplish five miles. Then we entered the 
town of Concord. But the sun was setting, and 
St. Johnsbury was yet sixteen miles away. If the 
road were to be of the same sort we should hardly 
get through at all in the dark ; so we began to 
think of a stopping -place. Two miles on we 
drove into a little saw-mill village at the outlet of 
Miles Pond, famous for pickerel, and we were told 
that there was no inn in the village, but that trav- 
ellers were sometimes " accommodated " at the 
house of a hospitable family, to which I drove. It 
was the last house in the village, a small, unpaint- 



128 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

ed, one-Story house, on the bank of the pond, and 
the tired horses gladly stopped on the grass before 
the door. A lady was sitting on the stoop, sewing 
by the last of the daylight. Could they take care 
of us for the night? She could not say; her hus- 
band would be at home from the field very soon ; 
she could take care of us, but he would have to 
say whether he could take care of the horses. We 
must await his coming. So we threw blankets over 
the horses and waited. The twilight came down. 
My rod, as always, was lying in the carriage, and I 
put on a large white fly and went to the shore of 
the pond. Two or three casts to get out line, then 
a long back cast, and— my fly was on a telegraph- 
wire which was high overhead behind me — and the 
leader went into a mass of raspberry-bushes along 
the bank which overhung the water. Telegraph- 
lines are among the abominations of anglers. They 
penetrate the wildest woods, and arrest one's cast 
in the most unexpected places. I have left flies on 
telegraph-wires all over the world. No amount of 
experience serves to make one careful. Three suc- 
cessive casts I left on a wire between Saltzburg 
and Ischl. Now I put on another fly, and threw 
it out among the stars, which were plenty and sil- 
very in the calm depths under the lily-pads. No 
pickerel should have been out so late, but there 
was one half-pound fellow who was still abroad, 
and he took the fly ; and while I was landing him 



FINDING NEW COUNTRY 1 29 

our host arrived, and said he could take care of the 
horses. So we went in, and were most kindl}^ and 
hospitably treated. The little house held us com- 
fortably. We had a broiled bird, eggs on toast, 
and abundant doughnuts, and cakes of various 
kinds, and milk in plenty for supper. 

The road was good next day through West Con- 
cord to St. Johnsbury, where we dined, and that 
evening we rested at Danville Green. 

Danville Green will assuredly be better known 
in future years. It is a little village on a lofty 
piece of upland farming country, commanding a 
majestic view. The most striking feature in this 
view is the eastern horizon, which is formed by the 
New Hampshire and Franconia mountains. Of 
these there is scarcely a known peak which, seen 
from this angle, is not brought out separately 
against the sky. Thus the White Mountain or 
Presidential Range, from Madison and Adams to 
the Crawford Notch, and the Franconia Range 
from the Crawford Notch to Lafayette and Kins- 
man, are laid out in a succession of elevations, 
while Moosilauke, at the extreme right, ends the 
serrated horizon line. 

Joe's Pond lies a mile or two to the westward of 
Danville Green, and Molly's Pond a few miles far- 
ther to the west, on the road we drove towards 
Montpelier. The waters of the former flow into 
the Connecticut, while the latter pours out in a fine 
9 



130 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

Stream which is one of the heads of the Winooski, 
or Onion River, emptying into Lake Champlain. 

On this outlet of Mollie's Pond is one of the 
finest cascades in the country. The stream, which 
has been rushing and roaring along its rocky bed, 
suddenly plunges down the hill into the valley in 
a white torrent. The fall may be 150 feet in height, 
not perpendicular, but over a series of steep, rocky 
steps. The forest overhangs it on both sides. If 
you are driving down the valley from Cabot your 
road passes directly in front of this magnificent 
water-fall. Were it in Switzerland it would have 
wide renown. On the direct road leading from 
Danville to Marshfield the cascade is not visible, 
though its roar comes out of the forest on your 
right as you pass near it. The cascade is known 
hereabouts as Molly's Falls. Molly's Falls are on 
Molly's Brook, and Molly's Brook flows from Molly's 
Pond. 

Joe and Molly are historical characters in the 
Coos country. Joe was a young Indian from Nova 
Scotia who, on the practical destruction of his tribe 
after the siege of Louisburg, drifted to the St. 
Francois tribe, and made his home on the Connect- 
icut where Newbury now is. He was always on 
kind terms with the early settlers, and lived to a 
good old age, enjoying a pension from Vermont 
until his death in 18 19. In his early days he took 
a wife (known to the whites as Molly) who had by 



FINDING NEW COUNTRY 131 

a former husband two sons named Toomalek and 
Muxawuxal. The latter died. The former Uved to 
be a grief to his mother. He is described as a 
short, broad, fiendish-looking, bad Indian. He de- 
sired for his wife a young girl, Lewa, who preferred 
and married another. Whereupon Toomalek, watch- 
ing for his opportunity to kill the favored lover, now 
the husband, saw the two sitting by their camp-fire 
in the evening, shot at the man and killed the wife. 
The Indians tried him by their law. Old chief 
John, a renowed warrior, presided, and laid down 
the law that as Toomalek had shot at the husband 
and missed him, he had committed no crime as 
against him ; that as he had not intended to shoot 
the woman in shooting at the man, the occurrence 
was accidental so far as she was concerned. So 
they discharged him. But John lived to repent his 
small knowledge of the distinct crimes of murder 
and manslaughter. Toomalek shortly after killed 
the husband in a fray, and again went free, it being 
adjudged that he acted in self-defence. It was old 
John who saved him again by his legal acumen. 

Old John's eldest and favorite son, Pial, with 
other young Indians, was walking across the fields 
now in North Haverhill, when an exchange of 
words sprang up between him and an Indian girl. 
She whispered in Toomalek's ear, and he, turning 
short, drove his knife through Pial, then and there 
killing him, contrary to Indian and white law and 



132 



ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



the peace of both communities. This time the 
whites undertook to administer justice, and they 
did it with a queer intermingUng of white and cop- 
per-colored law and practice. The court Avas ap- 
parently a town meeting, called at Newbury the 
morning after the murder, and the judgment of 
death was unanimous, including the Indian law that 
the father of the murdered man must kill the mur- 
derer. But first they sent a committee to consult 
the clergyman, whose approval being obtained, they 
made Toomalek sit down, and gave John a musket, 
with which he executed the judgment of private re- 
venge and public law on the son of Molly. 

Joe and Molly were present at the execution, 
buried the body themselves, and it is reported that 
Molly, who had but lately wept long and bitterly 
over the natural death of her other son, Muxa- 
wuxal, shed no tears for Toomalek, nor was ever 
heard to mention his name. During the War of the 
Revolution Joe w^as always on the side of the colo- 
nists ; was a great admirer of Washington; boasted 
of a visit he once paid to the great father at New- 
burg on the Hudson and of a kind reception there, 
and was known to have such permanent hatred to- 
wards the British that he w^ould never cross the 
Canada line even in following moose through the 
forests. His Indian friends could never persuade 
him to join the St. Francis tribe in Canada, nor 
when once they stole Molly and carried her there 



FINDING NEW COUNTRY 



^33 



would he go after her. She came back and died. 
He outlived her, and growing very old, received a 
pension of $jo per annum from Vermont until his 
death in 1S19. When he died the Newbury people 
did him honor, laid him in the north-east corner of 
the burying-ground, and discharged over his grave 
the last load which the old Indian had placed and 
left in his gun. Says Mr. Powers (the historian of 
the Coos country, from whose book I have con- 
densed this story): "with Captain Joe fell the last 
of the Indians at Coosuck, that once fairy-land of 
long-slumbering generations." 

You will see that the names " Joe's Pond " and 
" Molly's Pond" are sacred historical names. Some 
one will be trying t® change them some day be- 
cause they are not of pleasant sound. But they 
should stand. 

We dined at Marshfield, drove on to Plainfield, 
and instead of keeping on to Montpelier turned 
southward, crossing high hills with far views of the 
mountains, and reached Barre at sunset. 

As I entered the village an old friend greeted 
me. We had been together in many countries, and 
his greeting was the salutation of peace which is 
common in the Orient. 

Why is it that English-speaking peoples of all 
the world have none of those beautiful forms of 
greeting when friends meet ? It is because of this 
great lack in our language, or our customs, that 



134 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

travellers who have been in Oriental countries are 
fond of using Oriental salutations. The American 
or the Englishman, when he meets his clearest 
friends after a long or short separation, in ninety- 
nine cases out of a hundred asks him, "How do 
you do ?" or " How are you ?" Perhaps he varies 
it by saying, if surprised, " Why, John !'' Lovers 
have no more tender phrase when they meet in the 
presence of friends than the same " How do you 
do ?" The physician or the clergyman coming to 
the bedside of the sick man or woman, like all 
other friends, can only ask, " How do you do 
to-day?" or, "How do you find yourself?" or 
some other vague inquiry always beginning with 
"how." 

It is otherwise in parting. We have good old 
phrases of benediction which we use, whether we 
mean them or not. Why not some like phrases for 
salutation in meeting, like the old Romans, " Good 
health to you ;" or, best of all, that salutation which 
has been used in the Orient with uninterrupted suc- 
cession for thousands of years, " Peace be with 
you." 

What were the revisers of the Old Testament 
about when they failed to revise the King James 
translation of that salutation repeatedly occurring ? 
When the prophet met the woman whose boy lay 
dead at home, he did not greet her in the vague 
phraseology of the Englishman or the American, 



FINDING NEW COUNTRY 135 

'' Is it well with thee? Is it well with the child?" 
Nor did she answer with that cold word "Well." 
He said, "Is it peace with thee? Is it peace with 
the child ?" and she said, with infinite calm and 
trust, " It is peace." 



136 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



XIII 
BOYS WITH STAND-UP COLLARS 

What boys those were! Looking about one in 
the Christmas-times in New York, and seeing the 
crowds of young people who are at home from 
school for the holidays, it is impossible not to con- 
trast the bo3^s of to-day in the city with those boys. 
This is not the pessimist's way of always thinking 
the old times better than the latter days. It is no 
imaginary contrast. It is simply the demand of the 
modern boy, which he makes on you wherever you 
meet him, to examine and pronounce judgment on 
him. He challenges your opinion. His mother 
sent him out into the street to challenge it. He is 
a work of art, and as such is set before you to be 
admired, with the expectation that you will look at 
him and pronounce on the quality of the art which 
has produced him. These little specimens of young 
humanity, with tight little trousers, tight little coats, 
tight little white chokers around their necks, little 
canes in their hands and little thoughts m their 
heads, arc correct representatives of the boys that 



BOYS WITH STAND-UP COLLARS 1 37 

some modern mothers are bringing up for the next 
generation of men. 

It is a melancholy fact, which no father who has 
daughters can fail to recognize, that the girls of to- 
day are in education and personal force of charac- 
ter much ahead of the boys. There are plenty of 
hearty, bright, brilliant, sensible girls. Society has 
not spoiled them, with all its frivolities. 

Society is an essential part of this life. Those 
who abuse it with wholesale sweeping denuncia- 
tions do not know what they are talking about. 
The purpose of education and life is happiness — 
here and hereafter. She who has been so educated 
that she is able to be happy and hopeful and to 
confer happiness and hopefulness on those around 
her — is well educated. This life and the other life 
are closely interwoven, and it is by no means nec- 
essary to abandon this life for the sake of getting 
ready for that. The duties of this life are present 
duties, and whatever be our social surroundings, 
whether in the informal associations of country soci- 
ety or in the settled formalities and splendid deco- 
rations of city society, there are duties which men 
and w^omen owe to one another. Those who in- 
veigh against the evils of society would do well to 
measure the certain results which w^ould follow the 
abolition of that which they decry. Our civiliza- 
tion rests for its support on the splendors and lux- 
uries of life far more than on the utilities. Our 



138 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

charities, hospitals, missions, all derive their sup- 
port from the wealth which is the product of our 
social system. No mechanic, mason, carpenter, 
hod-carrier, artisan, tradesman, whatever his em- 
ployment, whatever he produces or sells, would 
have a dollar to give to the church or the poor but 
for the fact that the rich wear rich apparel, live in 
gorgeous houses, give brilliant receptions, enjoy the 
splendor of modern social life. 

In this social life, whether its brilliancy be that 
of intellectual gatherings, or of dress and formality, 
woman has right to rule supreme. There is no 
work of art on earth, ancient or modern, more 
beautiful, more worthy of admiration, than a well- 
dressed woman. If she were not a thing to be ad- 
mired, the saint of old time, to whom were given 
visions of heaven, would not have likened the 
Holy City to a bride adorned. The pathway to the 
better country does not necessarily lie through the 
waste places of this life. Many saints there be 
who have walked it among all the splendors and 
allurements of society. Mostly, I think, women, 
not men. x\nd in our own day, it is undeniable 
that the young women in society are in general the 
intellectual superiors of the young men. Some 
parents look solely for wealth in selecting husbands 
for their daughters ; but I imagine these parents 
are more rare than is commonly believed. And it 
is certainly true that many judicious fathers and 



BOYS WITH STAND-UP COLLARS 1 39 

mothers, recognizing the ability of their daughters 
to be blessings and adornments of homes and of 
society, are sadly occupied in measuring the visible 
inferiority of the young men whom they see and 
estimate side by side with their daughters. 

What boys those were ! Can these little fellows, 
with tight collars and cravats at fourteen, ever 
make such men as those boys made. There is 
something wholly inconsistent with development 
of intellect in a tight stand-up collar around a boy's 
neck. Freedom of physical action is certainly es- 
sential to freedom of mind and thought. Fashion 
imposes on men in society formalities of dress. 
The rules of society are proper and obedience is 
necessary; otherwise society would degenerate and 
license destroy its system, which must be preserved. 
Therefore men in society must dress as the rules 
require, however ill be the taste which has made 
the rules. But boys are not in society ; and it is a 
fearful blunder which mothers make in dressing 
their boys as if they belonged to a social system, 
or according to the rules of any such system, thus 
teaching them to demand such dress as they grow 
older, and to regard it as a governing consideration 
in life. Boys who dress in the style of some ab- 
surd-looking slips of humanity one meets nowadays 
can't possibly be boys. They are little automatons, 
mimicking the solemnities of mature life, carica- 
turing the sober realities of society. 



I40 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

What boys those were ! — I say it again. The 
memory of them comes with the fresh brilliancy of 
a December Christmas wind out of the north, 
sharp, clear, with the sound of sleigh-bells and 
shouts. Are there any like them now? Doubt- 
less plenty ; but the modern schools, with gymna- 
siums for training the physical system, do not seem 
to turn out one in three, or one in a dozen, such 
boys as used to be in any high-class school in the 
country. Tlie contrary is asserted. I don't be- 
lieve it. Never did the system of old Greece, 
which classed athletics among the three great 
branches of education, make more noble speci- 
mens of young strength than our country schools 
did in old times, and perhaps now do. But these 
are never the boys that wear tight things around 
any of their muscles — above all, never boys that 
wear stiff stand - up collars habitually. To be a 
great boy is easier than to be a great man. It 
comes naturally with pure association, liberal use 
of muscles as well as mind, freedom of feeling 
which comes from freedom of clothing. It is easy 
to spoil what would be a great boy if let alone. 
Put him up to thinking much of how he looks when 
dressed to go out, and the boy will turn out next 
to worthless as a boy among boys, and have poor 
prospects as a man. 

Perhaps I mistake those boys of old time, and 
the glow which invests them is the deceitful light 



BOYS WITH STAND-UP COLLARS 141 

that memory sometimes creates like a halo around 
the things we loved long ago. But there is no 
error in the estimate one must make of a large 
class of boys in modern cities. There is good 
stuff in them, but the vigor and force is taken 
out of it between the ages of eight and fifteen. 
They have by that time no independence of char- 
acter ; are, at their best, imitators, without self-re- 
liance. It is a bad thing to make a boy's ambition 
to be measured by what other boys do, his ideas of 
taste controlled by other boys' ideas, his language 
and conversation reduced to the slang of a set of 
boys. 

If you have no other guide in conducting your 
boy's life, good mother, take this : Give him some- 
thing to remember; keep him from all that he would 
in mature life wish to forget. There is no more 
precious possession to the man than memories of 
boyhood. They grow more precious with advan- 
cing age. If it be possible, forbid in your boy's 
life that he shall ever look back from the serious 
years of maturity and have to say to himself, 
"What a httle fool I was in those days!" All men 
remember follies, and the honest follies of a boy 
are pleasant memories, that one can laugh at and 
remember joyously. But deliberate follies persist- 
ed in from year to year, through all the sunniest 
years of life, are not pleasant to look back at ; and 
saddest of all they will seem if the boy-man shall 



142 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

have to say, " I was a foolish boy because my par- 
ents made me one." 

All this because of the group of country boys we 
saw at play in front of a school-house on the road- 
side. They were stout, healthy, happy boys, and 
some of them will be men of mark hereafter. 



PILGRIMAGE ENDED 



143 



XIV 
PILGRIMAGE ENDED 

It is a windy night. Elsewhere it might be 
called a tempestuous night, but up in the north 
country of New Hampshire we are used to high 
winds, and this is only a gale, not a tempest. The 
forest is uttering thunderous voices, such as it al- 
ways utters when arguing with the wind. You can 
find resemblances to any and every sound you ever 
heard in these forest sounds. Low voices in va- 
rious tones mingle with the roar. Sitting here in 
the cabin, you will think them like whatever your 
mind happens to be directed towards. I have been 
reading a book ; therefore I hear the sound of the 
surf on a reef, and the whistling of the wind through 
the cordage of a ship, and the cries of people in 
many tones. I have been reading an account of a 
traveller landing from a ship at the port of Jaffa — 
ancient Joppa — the seaport of Jerusalem. They 
call it a port, but it is no port. The steamer anch- 
ors in the offing. If the wind be off shore you 
can go safely enough through the break in the reef ; 
if the wind be otherwise, and be only a little fresh, 



144 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

the landing is difficult, sometimes impracticable. 
Several times I have gone through the reef, and 
fought my way up the steps into the crowd of 
Turks, Arabs, and infidels on the shore street of 
that wretched Jaffa. The last time that I was there 
I did not go ashore. The day was memorable, and 
comes back in memory whenever, as now, I read of 
the experience of travellers on their way to the Holy 
City. 

We were coming down the coast of the Levant 
on the Austrian Lloyds' steamer. The only first- 
class passenger on board besides ourselves was a 
Greek caloyer; but the deck of the ship was loaded 
with hundreds of poor pilgrims on their way to 
Jerusalem — a crowd of men, women, and children 
of various nationalities, mostly showing signs of ex- 
treme poverty, and all very far away from godliness 
in the matter of cleanliness. It was difficult to 
make one's way along the deck without treading 
on arms or legs or children. Why do those poor 
pilgrims always take such crowds of children to 
Jerusalem ? 

In the cabin all was pleasant. The steamer was 
of the first-class, and her table was of the best I 
ever saw at sea. It was in consequence thereof 
that I made the acquaintance of the priest, our 
only fellow-traveller ; for at the dinner-table we sat 
down only five persons, of whom two were the cap- 
tain and the ship's surgeon ; and when I praised a 



PILGRIMAGE ENDED 1 45 

dish, the latter spoke, saying, "We are proud of 
our table, and think we have the best cook but one 
in the Austrian Lloyds' service." 

" Yes, he is certainly a great cook ; but who is 
his superior?" 

" His father, who is one of the oldest cooks in 
the service, and has six sons, all cooks in the serv- 
ice, and two daughters married to cooks in the 
service." 

"A valuable family to the service," said a re- 
markably gentle and yet strong voice at my side, 
and I turned to look at the man who had just taken 
his place by me. He was a man of forty or forty-five, 
full six feet high, wearing the elevated black cap 
of the Greek Church. His face was singularly at- 
tractive and impressive, the features sharp cut, fore- 
head high, complexion surprisingly white and pure, 
eyes dark, full of life and full of benevolence. It 
was a face to fall in love with. The expression of 
his eye as my glance met his was winning, and his 
whole appearance that of power and saintliness 
combined. Somewhat such a man I think was the 
Apostle John. It is rare to meet one whose look 
impresses you thus with the thought that this man 
is not of the world, worldly. I had prejudices 
against Greek monks and priests, for most of those 
that one meets in Egypt and Syria are ignorant, 
absolutely dirty in dress and person, and generally 
objectionable ; but of this man I said at once he is 



146 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

a typical Caloyer, ^aXoQ yEpoQ — a " beautiful elder " 
in the Church ; and with a suddenness, of which I 
doubt not you remember examples in your experi- 
ence among men, I yielded myself to the charm 
which drew me towards him. It soon appeared 
that he was a man of much learning as well as 
much experience among men, and our conversa- 
tion, commenced at the dinner-table, continued on 
deck until late in the night. 

Thrown by accident on a steamer loaded with 
Greek pilgrims, he found work to do, and he did it 
here as everywhere, on his Master's service. He 
seemed at once to know the case of every family 
and group among them ; and though many were 
uncouth and by no means gentle in their manners, 
he was rapidly recognized by all, or most of them, 
as a good pastor, and was unwearying in his atten- 
tion, especially to the sick and suffering, of whom 
there were not a few. When we came out from 
Beyrout to run down the Phoenician coast, we met 
a sirocco, and there is no storm more trying. Hot 
and fierce, the wind seemed to cut off your breath 
as with a red-hot sword, and all day long the blue 
seas went over the ship, half-drowaiing the misera- 
ble pilgrims who lay huddled in masses all over the 
deck. It was a brief luxury of rest when we ran 
under the lee of Mount Carmel and dropped anch- 
or for an hour or two at Haifa. 

It is memorable now, in connection with what 



PILGRIMAGE ENDED 147 

afterwards occurred, that we talked that evening of 
pilgrimages. He was making the pilgrimage. He 
had never seen Jerusalem, and was now devoutly 
going to the Sepulchre. Across the plain of Es- 
draelon, which touches the sea near Haifa, we 
looked at the huge slopes of Lebanon, and I tried 
to point out to him, among more distant mount- 
ains, the peaks of Tabor and Gilboa, the hills that 
are around Nazareth, and the dark summit .of Lit- 
tle Hermon, which looks down on the blue beauty 
of the Sea of Galilee. And then we talked of pil- 
grims in old times, in all the ages, and spoke es- 
pecially of the exceeding bitterness of their disap- 
pointment who, after long journeys across Europe 
and over the sea, reached the gates of Jerusalem, 
and when the Saracens forbade their entrance, lay 
down and died under the very walls, never having 
seen the Sepulchre. 

The sun went down in white dust, the desert 
sand of Arabia flying over the sea before the siroc- 
co, and the ship again plunged into the face of the 
tempest. In the morning at daybreak we anchored 
in the roadstead off Jaffa, two miles or so from the 
shore, and the first fierce jerk of the ship at her 
chain threatened to hurl everything out of her. 
What an anchorage that was ! A tremendous sea 
was running. Under ordinary circumstances the 
captain would not have anchored, but would have 
gone on with his passengers to Alexandria. This 



148 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

is sometimes, often, the luck of those who seek to 
reach Jerusalem. But it lacked only a few da3^s of 
the Greek Easter, the great day of the pilgrimage, 
and if carried on to Egypt, these hundreds of poor 
pilgrims would miss the chief object of their long 
journey. So the good Austrian officer anchored, 
and fired cannon to tell the Jaffa boatmen that it 
was for them to decide whether they would take the 
risk of coming out through the surf on the reef. 
We rolled and plunged and waited. About nine or 
ten o'clock, the wind seeming to draw a little more 
directly off shore, the shore boats began to appear 
and disappear, rising and falling on the great waves 
as they came towards the ship, and at length were 
alongside. It was a fearful business to get into 
them, the steamer rolling over almost on her beam 
ends at every sea. With long delay and much dan- 
ger, boat after boat received a load of pilgrims and 
luggage, and one after another went tossing shore- 
ward and safely passed the opening in the reef. 

On board were left fifteen or twenty timid wom- 
en and men who had not dared the fearful descent 
of the ship's ladder, and my friend, the priest, who 
had remained to the last to give them all his aid 
and comfort. There was one queer little old wom- 
an who passed the time in alternate shrieking, 
laughing, and crying. Ten times she essayed the 
ladder when the ship rolled to port, and rushed 
back or tumbled back on deck when the angle 



PILGRIMAGE ENDED 1 49 

changed and the bottom step was ten feet above 
the boat. The priest gently encouraged her, but 
in vain, and at last a sailor, watching his chance as 
she once more shrieked and fell back, seized her 
in his arms, rushed down the steps and tossed her 
like a bundle into the boat. She was the last ex- 
cept my friend. I took his hand, and we parted 
with many Oriental words of peace. He reached 
the boat, took his seat on a bench in the middle, 
and as she swung across the stern of the ship on a 
long wave he bared his noble head, and with re- 
peated waves of our hands, and words lost in the 
storm, we exchanged the last salutations. He looked 
like a pastor with his flock around him. Calm, 
silent, his forehead swept with the fierce sirocco 
wind which he was facing, I followed them with 
my eyes, now on wave tops, now wholly lost to 
sight. At length I used my glass — a fine marine 
glass — it lies here to-night on the cabin table — and 
with that I kept them steadily in view. The reef 
was a white wall of foam dashing high into the air. 
As they approached a narrow opening where a 
darker sea indicated the passage, the waves grew 
shorter. Their boat appeared and vanished in 
quick succession. "■ Are they past the opening ?" 
"I cannot tell; I think they are just in it. The 
sea is awful." And the words were not uttered 
when in the field of my glass I saw a terrible vision. 
The boat was lifted on a mass of water, it rose high, 



150 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

and then suddenly I saw the bow thrown up, a 
hideous confusion of men and women and children 
among oars and baggage were hurled into the white 
surf on the reef, which leaped into the air trium- 
phant, and I saw no more of them ; only the upturned 
boat, floating, and tossed now and then into full 
view, swept northward along the shore, and finally 
went on the sandy beach in the breakers a half- 
mile north of the northern wall of the city. 

So seeking Jerusalem that is below, before his 
pilgrim sandals had yet touched the soil of the be- 
loved land, my newly-made and newly lost friend, 
the good priest, found Jerusalem that is above, 
the mother of us all. 

I have thought of him a thousand times since 
then, most frequently when in the forest on windy 
nights. In the roar of the mountain storm which 
rages around the cabin, mingled with the shrieks of 
the forest trees writhing and intertwining their giant 
arms, I recall that pale, calm face and commanding 
form as the boat sweeps shoreward on the great 
seas of the Mediterranean ; and while I see him 
wave his hand, I can hear again and again and 
ao-ain, as I could not then hear what I knew he was 
saying, Salame, sala?ne, salavie, " Peace, peace, peace." 
And I know that in every tempest, on land or sea, 
the war of the elements is but a little agitation 
which to our weak sense seems great. The mount- 
ain stands calm, though my cabin shakes in the 



PILGRIMAGE ENDED 151 

Storm, and the surroundings which I have made 
seem ready to be swept away. And the Peace of 
Jerusalem — the peace that passes our understand- 
ing — the peace whose blessing he gave me across 
the sea when he waved his white hand to me in the 
sirocco blast — that peace is more calm than the 
mountain, more enduring than sea and shore, and 
abides forever in the City of Peace whither he went 
that morning through the tempest. 



152 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



XV 

NON-RESISTANCE 

It is very difficult for the honest advocate of the 
doctrine of non-resistance to Uve up to his princi- 
ples. The duty of self-defence, the divinely-or- 
dained right of the master of the house to forbid 
the spoiling of his goods, the self-evident law which 
commands every one to defend the weak against 
the oppressing strong, these are requirements which 
a man may honestly try to ignore, but which, unless 
he be a coward, he will never succeed in ignoring 
when the trial of his faith comes. The sturdy non- 
resistant, sturdy of soul as of body, who has yes- 
terday defended a little child from the attack of a 
dog, will to-day defend the same child from the at- 
tack of a brute in shape of man, and to-morrow will 
defend his country and government against ene- 
mies. 

In one of the villages through which we drove 
yesterday was once a society called a non-resistance 
society. Its members were men and women, good, 
honest, well-meaning people all of them. Its history 
was brief, but not altogether uneventful. It was 



NON-RESISTANCE 1 53 

strong in its principles, but it was from time to time 
enfeebled by the failures of its members in prac- 
tical life ; and when at last the Civil War began it 
ceased to exist, because some of its members 
went to fight for the Union, and all the others en- 
couraged them to go and rejoiced in their pa- 
triotism. 

While it existed, and indeed long before it was 
organized, Jabez Dickinson was known in the whole 
town as a steadfast advocate of the doctrine of 
submission without forcible resistance. 

He was the village merchant, kept the village 
store, where he sold everything from silk ribbons 
to tallow candles and sugar candies. He was not 
a deacon, but he was always named and know^n as 
Deacon Jabe, because there was never known a 
man who more firmly, boldly, and consistently as- 
serted and practiced the doctrines of the Christian 
life. Universally loved and respected by the peo- 
ple, old and young, he had led a long life of peace 
and quiet, doing good and getting good. And dur- 
ing this life he had been an unwavering non-resist- 
ant. He was not much of a talker. He seldom 
preached. But in the store, where it was the cus- 
tom of the men of the community to gather, espe- 
cially on Saturday evenings, the nickname deacon 
had been given to him for years, and thence had 
travelled through the community. Seldom volun- 
teering opinions, he was often appealed to for the 



154 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

decision of mooted questions. And if you do not 
know it, I can tell you that in the country store 
there are daily discussions of questions, moral, phil- 
osophical, religious, and practical, in which at least 
as much average good sound sense and logical 
power is developed as in any meeting of any of the 
modern scientific associations, British or American. 
Always, however. Deacon Jabe had laid down and 
adhered to his non-resistance principles, and this 
in the face of much provocation to think and act 
otherwise. Many indignities he had suffered from 
fellows of the baser sort, insults and personal 
wrongs, always taking them meekly and without 
resentment. In all the town there was but one 
supporter of his radical views, and he often wished 
he was free from that ally ; for Miss Almira Smith 
was a cantankerous talker and fighter, doing with 
her tongue a perpetual war, offensive and defensive, 
while she proclaimed the sinfulness of physical of- 
fence or defence with any other muscles or member 
of the human body. For, after all, it is but a ques- 
tion of muscles, and the non-resistant who forbids 
blows with the fist is often a conscientious dealer 
of deadly blows with the voice. 

The deacon had received much and sore provo- 
cation that week from Silas iMaxwell, the town bully, 
a fellow of powerful structure, who rejoiced in his 
ability to whip any man in the county. And he 
had fought many battles, not in sport, with invaria- 



NON-RESISTANCE 1 55 

ble victory. My story would be too long were I 
to recite the talk on Saturday evening in the store 
when Silas nagged Jabez and insulted him again 
and again, presuming, and boasting that he pre- 
sumed, on the deacon's non-resistance, which Silas 
said was nothing but cowardice. " He don't resist 
bekase he daresent resist," said the bully, walking 
across the store and helping himself to a chunk of 
tobacco, at the same moment opening a huge knife 
wherewith to cut off a mouthful. 

Little Katie Wheeler was the deacon's grand- 
daughter, a lovely child, the joy of his life, sole de- 
scendant of his dead wife and daughter. Katie 
was a sad invalid, but she had a well mind, never 
ill, never sickly. All day long she was in and out 
of the store, always breezy and cheery, making per- 
petual spring-time in the life of the lonesome man. 
Her little chair stood where in the evenino:s she sat 
till her grandfather closed the door and she walked 
home with him. Every one loved Katie — even Silas 
Maxwell, brute though he was. As Silas took the 
tobacco in his hand, Katie sprang from her chair 
and snatched it away from him, saying, " Silas 
Maxwell, you sha'n't steal granther's tobacco any 
more." The child's impulsive act and clear ring- 
ing voice were greeted with a shout from the fifteen 
or twenty villagers in the store. The act, the word 
"steal," and the approving shout roused the devil 
in Silas, and, seizing Katie by the arm, he uttered 



156 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

a brutal oath as he raised his right hand with the 
open knife to strike. 

Jabez had kept his eye on the man, and up to 
this instant had been struggling to keep down what 
he believed to be his sinful desire to silence the 
other's insolence with earthly weapons. Now, as 
he saw the knife raised, he was a converted man. 
Well was it for Katie that her grandfather in the 
long-forgotten days of his sinful youth had been 
mighty in battle, power residing in the muscles of 
his arms and shoulders, for which he had been fa- 
mous when Silas Maxwell was a child. The dea- 
con's legs were like steel springs, and without wait- 
ing for his mind to direct them, they of their own 
free will launched him like a rock from a catapult 
across the store. The shoulder and arm acted 
next, for the deacon always declared that it was the 
physical body God had given him which acted for 
itself when the closed fist dealt on the bridge of 
Silas Maxwell's nose an awful blow. The bully 
reeled backward one, two, three short steps and fell, 
full length, over a keg of nails. 

Jabez stood silent, while Silas gathered himself 
up. He knew what was coming, and now he rea- 
soned within himself, swiftly but sufficiently. And 
when the huge fellow rushed at him intent on 
crushing him, the old skill (he said it was learned 
in the devil's service) now came to him for the 
Lord's service in the defence of himself and the 



NON-RESISTANCE 157 

child and the just punishment of that ruffian. Silas 
Maxwell had for the first time met his master. 
Those trip-hammer blows of Jabez Dickinson's tre- 
mendous fist live in the village traditions. There 
were but three, or at the most four, of them, with 
the right arm first, with the left arm second, the 
other arm stopping the puny thrusts of the bully. 
And so it came about that Jabez drove Silas across 
the store till he stood with his back to the window, 
open to the floor. When he had him there he 
dealt one more and final blow, right between the 
big man's eyes, a blow backed up with a continu- 
ous thrust from all the weight of his body, which 
threw the ruffian off his feet, heels overhead through 
the window. The mill-race ran close under that 
window. The deacon knew it, and had been think- 
ing of it all the forty seconds or less between the 
first rush of Silas and his final exit. " Go out, 
some on ye, and take him out. I kinder think he's 
got enough of it," said Jabez, very calmly, as he 
sat down and took Katie on his knees and kissed 
her. 

There was silence and awe in the store for a few 
moments. Then some one came in and said that 
Silas reckoned he had got enough, and had gone 
home. Silas was converted then and thencefor- 
ward. 

Not so the deacon. He was, like all non-resist- 
ants under like circumstances, in some danger of 



158 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

relapse into his old folly. I have not space to re- 
late at length how his new sentiments became fixed. 
It came about in this way : Miss Smith made a 
descent on him the next day and poured out on 
him the vials of her peculiarly unpleasant wrath for 
"goin' back on non-resistance." He listened in 
silence. Again and again, and again, alone and in 
presence of whatever people might be in the store, 
that inexpressible and intolerable female rated Ja- 
bez. And Jabez became hardened. At last he 
deliberately macle up his mind that resistance to 
a male bully like Silas had been a religious duty, 
and, as a corollary, that resistance, duly measured 
for the case, to a female bully like Almira Smith, 
would be a virtue. So he prepared a trap, and one 
day when Almira was coming down the street, and 
Jabez knew that her entrance and assault on him 
were as certain as foreordination, he set the trap, 

"Jabez," said the sharp voice, as its owner en- 
tered the store, "Jabez Dickinson," it repeated, as 
she crossed the floor. " Look out, Almiry," said 
the deacon; "stop jist there or you'll spill some- 
thin' !" 

"What are you talkin' about. Deacon Jabez 
Dickinson," said the keen, piercing voice. " I've 
come in because I can't find it in me to pass by 
without warnin' you — " At that moment there 
descended around Almira Smith a cloud of fine 
black pepper. It began gently, and she interrupted 



NON-RESISTANCE 1 59 

her tirade with a sneeze. She tried to resume, but 
the more she tried the more she sneezed, and the 
clouds gathered thicker around her. Sneezing and 
dignity are incompatible. Continuous sneezing is 
incompatible with self-respect or self -admiration. 
Almira had no idea of charging her convulsive 
affliction to the deacon's new doctrine of resist- 
ance to vocal and other physical assaults. She 
abandoned the field ,• she sneezed along the road 
home ; she sneezed all night. 

And Jabez chuckled, and kept his secret, and 
lived, and is living now, a sensible man. " Ye see," 
he said, in confidence, " I could 'a' stood Silas, and 
if he'd 'a' come back I'd 'a' told him I was sorry. 
Silas came in, and before I got a chance he told me 
he was sorry, and I kind o' concluded I had been 
doin' right. But the nat'ral man couldn't stand 
Almiry Smith." 



l6o ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



XVI 

SONGS OF THE AGES 

I HAD driven into the village the evening before. 
I knew no one there. The inn was clean and neat ; 
the stable was good , my horses and myself had a 
quiet Sunday rest. In the church in the morning 
was the usual slim congregation, thirty or forty peo- 
ple. Notice was given of a "service of song" at 
the school-house in the evening. 

It was a small room, and crowded. The kero- 
sene lamps gave a dim light and a vile smell. 
There were more people there than had been in 
the church in the. morning. The room was very 
hot. A lady presided at the melodeon, facing the 
assembly. For a while she led, by playing one and 
another tune of her own selection. Then she asked 
any one to propose hymns or songs, and voices 
would be heard calling out this or that page of the 
hymn or song book they were using. When a page 
was so called she would at once turn to it, and 
they sang together ; it was good singing. They 
knew the words and tunes, and sang with spirit 
and appreciation. There were some harsh, some 



SONGS OF THE AGES l6l 

reedy, some sweet voices. All together were me- 
lodious. It was a pity, as it is everywhere in the 
north country, that the words they sang were most- 
ly doggerel rhymes which have become popular of 
late years, and have demoralized the hymnology of 
many parts of the country. 

At length the lady left the melodeon, and a man's 
voice broke the temporary silence which followed. 
He was praying. I sat near the door, and could 
see no faces. No one knelt or bowed a head. It 
is not the custom up there. His prayer was short, 
simple in diction, several times ungrammatical, but 
it was heard, I doubt not, for it was earnest, elo- 
quent, beseeching in its tone ; the prayer of one 
who felt deeply the load of this world's weariness, 
and whose faith was absolute in the promise of his 
Master, which he cited: "Thou didst say that if 
we would come to Thee we should have rest. Give 
us rest, O Lord ! Amen." 

Then there was silence again, and a woman's 
voice broke it. It was not a pleasant voice. It 
was somewhat nasal, a little sharp and shaky, and 
perhaps querulous in tone. She only sang a word 
or two alone, and then another, and then all the 
gathering joined her in that wonderful hymn, "Art 
thou weary, art thou languid?" 

There was something very moving, very thrilling 
in the utterance of the hymn by that group of up- 
country people. They were one and all hard- work- 



1 62 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

ing men and women, to whom life is the perpetua- 
tion of the curse — labor for bread. The touching 
words in which Dr. Neale clothed the sentiment of 
the hymn entered into their souls. There was all 
the eloquence of which the human voice is capable 
in the way they sang, with suppressed, inquiring, 
almost doubting voice, 

"If I still hold closely to Him, 
What hath He at last?" 

and a swelling triumph of assurance as they poured 
out the response, 

"Sorrow vanquished, labor ended, 
Jordan passed !" 

Music is not to be measured by any arbitrary 
rules of the musical world. I have often heard 
vesper song in St. Peters. I have heard a Te 
Deum in Notre Dame, sung to God — and to 
the emperor and empress. There was never mu- 
sic which ascended to Heaven more musical 
than that song in the little New Hampshire school- 
house. 

As I walked along the dark country road in a 
drizzling rain, stumbling over stones, and once 
bringing up short against the end of an open gate, 
I heard the voices of young people coming behind 
me. One said : " Girls, who wrote that last hymn 
we sung?" " I'm sure I don't know," said another. 



SONGS OF THE AGES 1 63 

It was not exactly the thing for a stranger to speak 
out in the darkness and tell them. But I went on 
to my inn, thinking on this wise : 

It is the fashion to speak ill of the ages called 
Dark Ages. By reason of the bitterness of theolog- 
ical controversy the Protestant world is very gen- 
erally imbued with the idea that for a long and 
somewhat indefinite period before the sixteenth 
century the European world and all the rest of the 
world was in a state of sin and iniquity ; degraded 
in intelligence, in arts and in religion ; that every- 
body went to the bad. The myth of the Dark 
Ages is still believed in. 

Out of those ages we have an abundant brilliant 
literature, as glorious art, as pure religion as our 
own age can boast. There was no more darkness 
then than now. There were weak men and great 
men, good men and wicked men, in the church and 
out of it, then as now. 

It is the fashion to ridicule the hermits and 
monks of the early ages. There were dirty hermits 
and dirty monks abhorring water and rejoicing in 
uncleanliness. We meet such men, called clergy in 
Roman and in Protestant churches, nowadays. But 
there were monks and hermits of another sort, 
too, as there are Roman and Protestant clergymen 
now, men of holy life and labor, whose works have 
followed and will follow them on earth and forever 
hereafter. 



164 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

From the dark road through the Uttle New Hamp- 
shire village my vision went to a great gorge in the 
mountains where the Kedron pours its floods in the 
rainy season, plunging downward from Jerusalem 
to the Dead Sea. The rocky walls of the narrow 
gorge, broken and irregular, rise two or three hun- 
dred feet above the noisy bed of the stream. Here, 
in caverns and hollows of the rocks, perching like 
eagles on the sides of the chasm, one and another 
man, weary of the world, came and made for him- 
self a hermitage, a hole, with what shelter the over- 
hanging cliff might give him. After a while path- 
ways, difficult and dangerous, along the ledges, led 
from one's miserable abode to that of another. So 
a community was formed, a sort of hermit village, 
and its fame went abroad ; for there were great 
men, learned men, noble men, who gave up the 
world and sought repose and oblivion in the gorge 
of the Kedron. Thus grew the famed monastery 
of St. Sabas, once the most powerful monastery in 
the Eastern Church. Here in the eighth century 
came John of Damascus, last and not least of the 
Greek Fathers of the Church ; and Cosmas of Jeru- 
salem, Cosmas the melodious, poet and holy man, 
whose songs are sung in all lands where Christians 
sing. And with them was one Stephen, of whom we 
know little more than that he was a Sabaite, and 
hence is called St. Stephen the Sabaite. These all 
wrote in Greek. St. John Damascene wrote the 



SONGS OF THE AGES 165 

" Resurrection Hymn," which is known in Dr. 
Neale's translation : 

" From death to life eternal, 
From earth unto the sky, 
Our Christ hath brought us over 
With hymns of victory." 

I wonder who was Stephen. He lived long, long 
ago — more than a thousand years ago. He was a 
man, and therefore he had sorrow and labor, and 
was heavy laden. He found rest, remembering the 
Master's invitation. He remembered the very words 
of it, as St. Matthew had recorded them, " Come 
unto me all ye that labor;" KOTnovreQ was the word, 
" Ye laboring ones." He wrote an exquisitely 
simple and beautiful song beginning Koiroi' re kch 
KctfiaTor : "labor and weariness" — and it touched 
the hearts of the good Christians of that and all 
the after ages in the Eastern Church. Yes, my 
friend, there were good Christians in the Eastern 
and in the Western Church, in all those times. 
Shake off the superstition that has enthralled you 
about the Church, and don't any longer imagine 
that all the people that have lived in Europe from 
apostolic times down to Luther's day are damned. 
You may find in heaven as large a proportion of 
souls out of what you call the Dark Ages as out of 
this age. There is no more sign of the millennium 
now than there was then. 



1 66 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

It was not a great many years ago that Dr. Neale 
translated, or perhaps rather reproduced the senti- 
ment of the hymn of Stephen the Sabaite in our 
tongue. And it entered the hearts of EngHsh 
speaking and singing and praying people, and 
touched the hearts of many who had not sung or 
prayed before ; so that now all over the world they 
sing: 

"Art thou weary, art thou languid, 
Art thou sore distressed ? 
' Come to me,' saith One, and coming, 
Be at rest!" 

I do not think there is any subject more worthy 
the philosopher's consideration than this presented 
to me in the school-house in a New Hampshire vil- 
lage by the dim light of two kerosene lamps, listen- 
ing to the voices of weary men and women singing 
the song which Stephen the Sabaite wrote, a thou- 
sand years ago, in the deep gorge where the Ked- 
ron pierces the wilderness, hurrying down to the 
Sea of Death. If I did not believe in any God I 
should feel bound to inquire into that sameness of 
human character, suffering, wearying, wanting — the 
same in old Palestine, the same in Russia, Greece, 
Asia, Europe, America, and that oneness with wlwch 
the monks of St. Sabas and the young girls of New 
Hampshire hold firm and unwavering the faith that 
was delivered to the saints. 



IGNOTUS 167 



XVII 

IGNOTUS 

The road was across an open country. The hills 
which skirted the western horizon were wooded to 
their summits ; only one massive peak of bare rock 
rose above the fringe of trees and stood out strong 
and almost black against the evening sky. The 
valley through which I was driving was very rich 
and fruitful. The farms were well kept, the farm- 
houses neat and comfortable, the barns and out- 
houses indicating by their appearance the thrifty 
character of the agricultural population. There 
was for several miles no house which did not stand 
in a group of trees, whose great trunks and spread- 
ing branches were proof of considerable age in the 
home location under their shade. At length I 
came where on each side of the road was a row of 
elms, large old trees, and soon to a group of houses. 
The road widened and parted into two roads, with 
a broad green between them. The elms were more 
abundant, scattered here and there on the green. 
A small church, with rows of horse-sheds behind it, 
a house which could not be mistaken for any other 



1 68 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

than the parsonage, a store in front of which hung 
the sign " Post-office," and about a dozen other 
houses formed the village. 

Before we reached the church the road passed 
the church-yard. A low stone-wall separated it 
from the road-side foot-path. It was easy, as the 
horses walked, to read the inscriptions on many 
headstones. It is always interesting to do this, 
for the mere sake of the names, both the surnames 
and the Christian names. I have given you lists 
of peculiar names thus perpetuated, which I have 
found in country graveyards. One acquires the 
habit of catching a name quickly, even at a distance 
and on a discolored stone. So as we passed along 
I read aloud one and another and another name, 
most of them old Bible names, now and then a 
strange name, doubtless a home invention. 

I read aloud Samuel, Hepzibah, Bezaleel, Marina, 
Isaiah, Ichabod, Ignotus— , and as I read the last 
name I said " Whoa" to the horses. Surely that 
could not be a man's name. I leaped over the low 
wall and went to the grave which was near it. The 
stone was a low, black-slate slab, on which green 
and gray lichens were growing in such density that 
the original color was invisible except near the top 
where the slab was cleaned, evidently with care, so 
as to leave the word " Ignotus" plainly legible. 
And there was no other word on the stone. 

Of course I was interested in this ; and you will 



IGNOTUS 169 

readily imagine the succession of thoughts which it 
aroused. At first I took it to be the grave of one 
who, possibly knowing of the celebrated Miserimus 
inscription, had directed the expression of utmost 
humility to be placed over his ashes. While I was 
pondering on this an elderly gentleman came along 
the road, and seeing where I was standing, paused 
at the wall. As I looked up he fixed his eyes on 
me with an expression which said as plainly as 
words could say, " You would like to know what 
that inscription means .^" I took him at his word — 
or at his eyes — and said, "Can you tell me any- 
thing about this stone .?" 

" Everything about the stone," was the reply, 
"very little about the dust that lies below it." 

" Then no one knows whose grave this is .''" 

" Precisely so. The inscription and the grave- 
mound together tell all that can be told. The 
mound is long. The inscription is in the mascu- 
line. The two tell you that an unknown man lies 
below." 

" May I ask who ordered the stone and the in- 
scription—for I fancy most if not all the other in- 
scriptions here are in the English language ?" 

" Yes, most of them ; not ahvays the best of 
English. I had this stone cut and set here. The 
stone-cutter didn't understand it. As a rule the 
people around here don't know what it means. 
Pardon me. I should introduce myself. I am the 



lyo ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

pastor of these people. Most of the sleepers here- 
abouts were of my flock. The living are my care 
now. These are in God's care." 

" And this man — he was not of your flock, I take 
it?" 

" No and 3^es. If the shepherd find a stray 
sheep in ill condition, he should surely care for the 
poor beast, and make it one of his flock till it goes 
to its master. So it was with this man and myself. 
He came into the village one dark night forty years 
ago. He was ragged, dirty, old. There was a tav- 
ern then over yonder. The landlord found him 
lying on the ground in front of his door. He was 
a good Samaritan, my old friend Hezekiah Bolter ; 
yonder is his grave. God give him rest ! He took 
the man in and sent for the doctor, and the doctor 
sent for me. But the man was past help from 
either of us. He showed no signs of conscious- 
ness until after some powerful stimulus which the 
doctor administered. Then he murmured a little. 
But he never opened his eyes. We stayed by him 
for hours. His murmurs took the form of short 
sentences, and these sentences were Latin. When 
they were complete I recognized some of them. 
They were familiar passages, now from Virgil, now 
Horace, now Juvenal. Were these memories of his 
boyhood, or were they the utterances of a mind fa- 
miliar, as a teacher's might be, with the Latin authors 
used in schools and colleges ? We did not discuss 



IGNOTUS 



171 



the matter then, but much afterwards ; and while 
the doctor maintained that the man was probably a 
teacher, I held to the theory that he was recalling 
memories, quoting passages which he had not 
thought of for years. We had, neither of us, any- 
thing on which to base our arguments ; which is all 
the better for freedom of discussion. He died be- 
fore morning. There was nothing in the pockets 
of his ragged clothing. We could learn nothing 
about him, and there was nothing to do but to 
bury him. I ordered the stone ; the doctor paid 
for it." 

Such was in brief, almost in full, the narrative 
which the good old man gave me, as we walked 
along to the gate by the side of the church, he on 
the outside, I on the inside of the wall. We met 
at the gate, and I ventured there to take his hand. 
The words he had spoken were a simple story, but 
there was a quaintness and earnestness in his tones 
which had quite won me. I am not sure that there 
are many pastors now (I know there is one) whom 
you would expect to hear of as staying all night by 
the side of a dying pauper, hoping for one interval 
of consciousness wherein he might give to the poor 
soul light for the dark road on which it was travel- 
ling. I ventured somewhat more, after I had taken 
his hand. I said, " And when you buried him you 
prayed for him." 

" Why do you think that ?" 



172 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

" Because just now you prayed for the repose of 
the soul of Hezekiah Bolter." 

"Ah, so I did; and so I do very often. What 
would be the lonesomeness, what would be the in- 
tolerable bereavement of this life of mine, of life in 
this world for you or me or any one, if we believed 
the dead were all gone out of the universe of God, 
out of his reach, into an unknown domain where 
they do not need a God, and prayer is vain. I have 
been in the cure of souls here for almost fifty years. 
The catalogue of those for whom it has been my 
duty to labor and to pray is larger on these stones 
and in these unmarked graves than in my list of 
the living. I never gave them up while they were 
here. I never gave up praying for them when they 
went out of the reach of my care." 

"And it seems to me you care somewhat for their 
graves. I suppose it is your care which has kept 
that word " Ignotus " so legible." 

" Yes. I have never passed that grave without 
saying to myself, ' Ignotus, Ignotus ; who was he, 
who is he, where did he go ? I don't know, but 
God knows. Lord have mercy on him !' " 

As I drove on in the gathering twilight I consid- 
ered what I had heard. There was something very 
pathetic in the story of the ragged wanderer who 
had left all that had been his in some part of the 
world and died unknown. But it is much the same 
with all of us. It is only a question of time how 



IGNOTUS 173 

soon the memory of every man's name and the 
place of his burial will be forgotten. If you look 
back two hundred years you wall astonish yourself 
by finding how few graves of the dead of two cen- 
turies ago are known by monument. If you go 
back a thousand years the number is very small. 
If you seek the graves of mighty men or renowned 
women of the more ancient time, say three thou- 
sand years ago, you will find, except in Egypt, few 
if any besides the cave of Machpelah at Hebron 
and the tomb of Rachel on the way-side between 
Jerusalem and Bethlehem. 

And the names of men are forgotten. They are 
merged in other and strange sounds. It is not at 
all certain that our pronunciation of those which 
have been handed down to us in phonetic charac- 
ters is remotely correct For all purposes of iden- 
tification you might as well call the great Macedo- 
nian Smith or Thompson as Alexander, pronouncing 
the word " Alexander " as moderns pronounce it. 
The Saracens call it Iskander. They are as near 
right as we are. But it is not alone the names which 
vanish. The greater the man the more certain it 
is that a doubting generation will arise who will 
pronounce the name and the man creatures of im- 
agination, pure myths. Homer has but a shadowy 
existence as a person. The greatest name in his- 
tory is that of Moses, giver of laws not only to Israel 
but to the whole race of civilized men to-day. And 



iy4 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

there are plenty of men of this age in which folly 
flourishes, who deny that there ever was a Moses. 
So the time may come when Washington will be 
the name of a shadow as unsubstantial as that of 
William Tell, and men will And in the fact that 
many peoples have legends of great and good lead- 
ers satisfactory evidence that no one of them ever 
had such a leader in veritable flesh. 



SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY 1 75 



XVIII 
SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY 

It was certainly as beautiful a spot for a home as 
one could find in this world. A rolling country, 
where the hills were sometimes crowned with maple 
forests in autumnal splendor of colors, sometimes 
cultivated to and over their ridges, yellow corn- 
fields glowing with vast heaps of orange - colored 
pumpkins, pasture lands in which good cattle were 
feeding leisurely, brush lots crimson with sumach, 
except where rich blue asters made spots of the 
earth to look like spots of the sky. 

But its beauty had not caused it to be thickly in- 
habited, had not even kept the population here 
which had once found homes in the valley ; for as 
my horses walked slowly up the hill road we ap- 
proached a house which, at a little distance off, 
looked picturesque and pretty, but as we came 
nearer was found to have only the beauty of ruin. 
It was a deserted farm-house. 

There is sometimes beauty in ruin. Nature oc- 
casionally takes hold of the works of men's hands 
and shapes and decorates them to be very beautiful. 



176 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

This old house had been a low story-and-a-half ten- 
ement, painted red. The red had faded and been 
washed into a score of tints, which only old tapes- 
tries and embroideries can match. Wild -cherry 
bushes, growing close around it, were trying to 
match them, and in trying made with their leaves 
very delicate and very surprising variations and con- 
trasts! There was a spot of brilliant color which 
caught my eye long before I reached the house, and 
when I came up to it I discovered that a young 
maple had sprung up in the shattered door-step, 
and filled the doorway with its foliage, mostly of a 
like color with the house, only there was a bunch 
of leaves at the top, all as golden as gold. 

Deserted farm-houses in New England are all 
alike in the most prominent features, generally re- 
sembling each other in many minute details. For 
the life in them was very much the same, and the 
life in the house gives specific character to the sur- 
roundings. The worn spot on the little piazza of 
the kitchen end, or L, is again and again visible, 
the spot where the farmer sat down daily for a little 
while when he took the very short rest which the 
farmer can afford to give himself in daylight. The 
marks on the inside of the window-seat are almost 
always there, made by the broken mugs and tea- 
pots and the cans and boxes in which his wife kept 
her flowers growing when frost drove them in-doors 
for the winter. Her garden is always there, and I 



SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY 1 77 

know a place where I go and gather roses some- 
times from bushes in a dense tangle, which were 
the garden roses of a farm-house that utterly van- 
ished more than fifty years ago. 

I drove on, still slowly uphill, and after a little 
saw the customary burial -ground, enclosed by a 
stone-wall, only a few rods from the road-side. Go- 
ing to it I found four upright stones, and on one 
of them read a name, and an inscription which was 
somewhat startling : " But now they desire a better 
country." 

Why do so many people make the mistake of ex- 
pecting to find that better country by going off on 
railways ? There is nowhere on earth a better 
country than this Northern New England country. 
When we get a reasonable amount of common- 
sense into legislatures and law-makers ; when they 
get to realizing what a good country theirs is, and 
how good it can always be if they will preserve the 
glory of their forests from the axe and the purity 
of their streams from the saw-mill, it will be safe for 
any one to make a home in it for the time he must 
spend among the things that are uncertain. 

Vermont and New Hampshire are becoming 
wide-awake to the extensive abandonment of farms 
and the gradual decrease of the best element in the 
population. The people are inquiring into the 
cause, with a view to finding a cure for the dis- 
ease. It is a disease, and it is a disease which 



178 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

affects the community and the State by affecting 
individuals. 

The inscription on that gravestone suggests the 
explanation of the disease. Those old people who 
are never going to travel off in search of a new 
home in the Far West were contented and happy 
enough in the red farm-house, looking for a better 
country beyond all seas, all possibilities of travel in 
the flesh. Later generations were not contented. 
Life was hard, and they thought to find a place 
where it would be easier. They went to a large 
town, to a city, to the West, It is beyond a doubt 
that they went to less happiness, to harder labor, 
with smaller reward. Not one in ten bettered his 
condition by the going. If you had known the per- 
sonal history of as many country families who have 
moved away from the old places as I have known, 
you would understand why I am so ready to affirm 
that the great body of New England emigrants who 
have gone away from these farms have done worse 
than they would have done had they remained in 
the old homes. 

Is it probable that the efforts now made to turn 
the tide of emigration and lead it into instead of 
out of New Hampshire and Vermont will succeed } 

Why not ? The land is fruitful and beautiful. 
The climate is wholesome and enjoyable. What is 
there to keep people away ? Nothing, except that 
vague idea which is so universally deceptive that 



SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY 1 79 

the better country, where one may grow rich v/ith 
ease, may live well without much labor, lies far off 
at the end of a railway or a steamer journey. 

There are some characteristics of American fam- 
ilies in which they differ greatly from people of 
other countries. One of these is in their ideas of 
what form the necessaries of comfortable life. 
That which goes to the daily support of a humble 
family in America would support in luxury two or 
three or more families in the same social position 
in old countries. There are a hundred considera- 
tions which an American has in selecting a home 
which no European would stop to think of. I do 
not find fault with these, but they are to be regard- 
ed in seeking the causes of depopulation of por- 
tions of the country. 

Contentment with a moderate enough is not an 
American characteristic. It ceases in a few years 
to characterize Europeans who come over here to 
settle. The " enough " includes too many things 
which are not necessities. Look at a practical il- 
lustration : There are great numbers of American 
families in cities who are in what are called reduced 
circumstances. Men, women, sometimes husbands 
and wives, have but small incomes. They have a 
hard time to get food and clothing in the position 
and with the surroundings to which they have been 
accustomed. They suffer ; their lives are full of 
struggling anxiety, pains, too often debts. They 



l8o ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

are unfitted for work, and work, if they were able to 
do it, is not easy to get. Thousands of these per- 
sons cling to life in the city, where rents are high, 
where food is costly, where the requirements of 
dress seem to demand much expense. Now at the 
same time you have the broad country, especially 
New Hampshire and Vermont, with these facts : 
The average expense of living of a family is not 
$500 a year, and this furnishes better and more 
abundant food, better and more clothing, better 
everything that men and women need, than can be 
found anywhere else in the world. You can hire 
a house for $100 a year in the country which is 
more roomy and comfortable than any house you 
can hire for $1000 anywhere within miles of Mad- 
ison Square. You can get better board the year 
round in country places at $3, $4, and $5 a week 
than you can get in a city for $13, $14, or $15. 

But if you suggest to the persons struggling on 
small incomes in city life that they go to the far off 
country villages of New England to live and be 
happy, they shrink with apprehensions they cannot 
define from what seems miserable exile, I am not 
the one to make light of those desires, tastes, habits 
of life which form the comforts and shape the pleas- 
ures of all of us. No one can be happy for any one 
else. But if the people who cling to life in cities 
and expensive towns could be persuaded to con- 
sider with common-sense the question whether, after 



SEEKING A BETTER COUNTRY I5l 

all, life in the country, with its abundant enjoyments 
and employments, and its small expense, is not the 
life they ought to adopt, it is probable that we 
should see a beginning of the repeopling of aban- 
doned farms, and a new growth of a valuable popu- 
lation. A new generation might grow up to love 
home well enough to live and die in it. 

It is not at all probable that the New England 
States will recall to their homes the same people, or 
call to them the same kind of people, who have left 
them. A new age has begun for all the eastern 
country. Wealth has increased in cities. The cus- 
tom of having a country as well as a city home is 
largely on the increase. Before many years all 
parts of the country which are healthy and attract- 
ive will draw purchasers of lands for country homes. 
Where a few will seek such homes in fashionable 
localities for society pleasures, hundreds will seek 
them in more economical and quite as enjoyable 
places. More and more families will go into the 
country for the whole year. More and more men 
will retire from active business on small fortunes, 
instead of remaining in it to increase them, with 
the hundred to one chances of coming to grief and 
losing all. People of moderate means, and people 
of wealth, too, will learn how much nobler is a race 
of children brought up in the country than a race 
brought up in the city. And, to bring this to a 
close, the man who can count on an income of $800 



1 82 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

a year while he has a family to support and care 
for, will be wise enough to go where he can buy a 
house and fifty or a hundred acres of land for $io or 
$20 an acre, and live like a prince on his own estate 
from its produce, with an outside income of six or 
seven hundred. But even there he must work. The 
better country than the city is beyond doubt the 
free land of fields and forests. But work and weari- 
ness he must have forever on this soil of earth, nor 
will there be work without weariness anywhere until 
he shall reach the better country far away, which 
the inhabitants of the old red farm-house desired 
and I hope found. 



A WINTER night's ERRAND 183 



XIX 
A WINTER NIGHT'S ERRAND 

This is the story which the doctor told me. 

Ezekiel Crofton's farm was on the slope of the 
hill, two miles in a straight line from the village. 
But to reach it you had to go more than two miles 
down the valley, and a long one up the hill road. A 
deep ravine, wherein flowed a noble trout stream, 
cut off the farm from more direct communication 
with the village. But the farm-house, with its barns 
and out -houses, was a conspicuous object in the 
landscape, as seen from the back windows of the 
doctor's library. 

There was sickness at the farm. EzekieFs wife 
and Susie's mother lay ill, and the doctor had left 
her late in the afternoon with no little anxiety. But 
he had other patients, for it was a sickly winter. 
So Susie was instructed what to do if her mother 
grew worse. It was of no use to give Ezekiel orders. 
He was crazy. Trouble like this had never entered 
the farm-house before. Susie was to watch her 
mother, and report by a simple telegraph. The 
doctor set the tall clock by his watch. At ten 



184 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

o'clock, at midnight, and at two o'clock, if her moth- 
er should be worse, or if certain indications ap- 
peared, Susie was to burn a blaze of straw on the 
snow-bank in front of the house. The doctor 
would see it and drive out. 

It was a cold night and the moon was young. 
The snow lay three feet deep on a level. A slight 
thaw, followed by a freeze, had left a glassy crust 
over everything. Then three inches of light snow 
had fallen without wind over this crust. It was 
after dark when the doctor reached home that night, 
and he was a weary man. Did I say he lived alone 
in his house ? Yet not alone, for one who had been 
its light until a few years before never seemed to 
him absent from it. And though now, as he sat 
before the big fire, no one sat visibly by him, there 
v/as a cheery look on his face, just as there used to 
be when he sat there and talked to her. It is a 
wonderful joy, that which some hearts have, of liv- 
ing with those they love, whether gone away on a 
visit, or gone across what men call the river of 
death. 

Dinner was on the table. Jupiter (son of Jupiter, 
who was also son of Jupiter, slave of the doctor's 
grandfather in that same village) stood while his 
master ate and drank. He never believed in the 
relationship between Burgundy and gout ; and many 
a bottle of good sound wine of the Wind-mill Vine- 
yard found its way from his cellar to the lips of 



A WINTER night's ERRAND 185 

the sick poor. The valley was a rich one, but 
the poor are always and everywhere. Would that 
such physicians with such cellars were equally 
abundant. 

"Watch Mr. Crofton's farm from five minutes 
before to five minutes after ten, and again at 
midnight," said he to Jupiter. And the dark eyes 
set in ebony could be perfectly trusted. 

The doctor was asleep on a lounge when mid- 
night passed. There had been no signal from the 
farm. At two he stood at the back window and 
saw the blaze flash up from Susie's bonfire, for the 
poor girl was frightened and heaped the straw 
high. By the successive flashes he knew that she 
was throwing it on in armfuls, and that there was 
great trouble and fear at the farm-house. 

The weather had changed. It was still cold but 
cloudy, and a snow-storm was hastening on. There 
were plenty of horses in the stable, and two power- 
ful sorrels plunged out of the gate-way and down 
the broad village street, bringing up with a fierce 
rattle of the bells in front of the stone house near 
the church where lived the clergyman. He, too, 
was ready, for he had received warning from the 
doctor in the early evening and had watched. I 
am tempted to speak of him, that man whose mem- 
ory is cherished by so many, who lived and died 
for those over whom he was appointed. But there 
is no space here. They two were men after one 



1 86 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

another's hearts. Happy the village with such a 
pair of doctors. 

And now the wintry part of the story begins. 
For as they started a gust of wind met them, whirl- 
ing the light snow which lay on the frozen crust. 
When they left the well-beaten village street and 
took the road down the valley a stiff gale was 
blowing. The track had been cut down like a 
deep canal between two banks, and the drift of 
the light snow which lay on the crust was fast fill- 
ing it. It grew darker, for the moon was just set- 
ting, and it began to snow heavily. The runners 
cut deep in the hard pack. The horses were well 
used to such w^ork, but there are impossibilities on 
roads before the best teams, and they found the 
first of these when the sorrels plunged into a heavy 
drift at the fork of the road where you turn up tow- 
ards Ezekiel Crofton's. Thus far they had come at 
little faster than a walk, but for a few rods the 
horses had found light pulling and were on a swift 
trot when they plunged into this drift which lay di- 
agonally across the road, full six feet deep. Down 
they went, while the doctors and the robes went in 
a confused mass over on the crust at the road-side. 

No one was hurt, and at the voice of their mas- 
ter, who was at their heads in an instant, the sor- 
rels recognized the situation and stood up. The 
drift was wide as well as deep, and the men right- 
ed the sleigh, gathered up the scatterings, then 



A WINTER night's ERRAND 187 

broke a road through the drift by trampling, and 
led the horses through and around the sharp turn 
into the hill road. All was made right, and they 
went on now very slowly ; for the whole track was 
filled to the level of the banks, and the track on 
this less travelled road was narrow, and had been 
imperfectly broken before the new drift filled it. A 
hundred yards from the turn the left runner rose 
over a lump, caught the hard bank at the side, and 
lifted the sleigh so gently but so swiftly that as the 
doctor said " Whoa " he found himself lying in 
deep snow, a buffalo robe over him, and the minis- 
ter on the buffalo robe. The horses had heard 
the word and stopped. This was a simple upset, a 
common enough affair to both of them. But a 
trace-hook had torn out, and it took ten minutes 
to mend it, for now they missed the lantern which 
had not been recovered at the first place of empty- 
ing the sleigh, 

I will not dwell on the many incidents of that 
struggle, which the doctor related with keen en- 
joyment of the memory. It was a serious piece of 
business then. Sometimes it would have been lu- 
dicrous, but for the solemn errand that took them 
out in that tempestuous night among the hills. The 
storm increased, and the snow fell fast and deep 
and drifted into heaps. Again and again they 
were upset until they ceased to count the times. 
Now they went ahead and broke the way on foot 



155 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

for the horses. Now they took the horses out of 
the sleigh, mounted and rode them a httle way to 
break road, and returned for the sleigh. Many 
good reasons forbade abandoning it. They were 
more than two hours on the half-mile between the 
fork of the roads and the first farm-house. Here 
they roused the people and held a consultation. 
Farmer Brown had six oxen in a stable a quar- 
ter of a mile off the road. He and his boys went 
for them. It took an hour or more to get them 
to the house, and the boys came near perishing. 
But who would not have worked that night, at any 
risk, to get the parson and the doctor to the bed- 
side of Mrs. Crofton ? The six oxen were put into 
the road, and driven up the hill through the drifts. 
Slowly and with infinite toil, shouting and encour- 
agement, they floundered on. The sorrels followed 
in the track they broke. It stopped snowing, with 
the atmosphere far below zero, as the gray dawn 
came, and it was broad daylight when they entered 
the back gate of the Crofton farm-yard. 

The roadway to the door crossed a hillock in 
front of the house, and the wind had swept it clean 
of drift. The horses sprang up the apparently 
clear track, but at the very summit again the left 
runner flew high and the last upset was accom- 
plished. In full view of the windows, as if it were 
a circus show, the two doctors shot into the air and 
clutched each other before they struck the glassy 



A WINTER NIGHTS ERRAND 1 89 

surface of the hillock. They struck in a slanting 
fall and slid to the verge of the short but sharp 
descent. There was nothing to catch hold of, so 
they held tight, each to the other, and went like 
projectiles down the icy slope, head first, into a 
deep soft bed of snow. Ezekiel Crofton's New- 
foundland dog was on the spot as their heads dis- 
appeared, and then nothing was visible for a mo- 
ment but his huge black skin and the doctor's 
boots and one leg of the minister, at which the dog 
was tugging as if to save a drowning man. 

So ended, and ended joyously, too, the merciful 
errand of that night. For the doctor, when he en- 
tered the sick-room, found Susie in a wild excite- 
ment, and her mother sitting up in bed laughing, 
and out of danger. I don't know what the doctor 
called the disease of which she was supposed to 
be dying. It was some trouble of the throat. She 
had been lying with her face towards the window, 
gasping. Even in the hour of death, when she was 
looking into the light as of the last earthly morn- 
ing, the scene had overpowered all sense of solem- 
nity, and the burst of laughter had removed the 
trouble which was killing her. 

It might do you good, once in a while these win- 
ter nights, when you wake warm and comfortable 
in your city bed, to think what possible errands 
men like those two may just then be out on in the 
up country. 



igo ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 



XX 

HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL 

First as to horses. There is a common idea that 
heavy horses are not as good travellers as lighter 
animals. This does not accord with my experience 
in really working-horses. For a spurt, or a day or 
two of hard driving, it may well be that light horses 
will go faster and come in less worried than heavier 
animals. But for continuous travelling, with a rea- 
sonably heavy load, day after day, taking any and 
every kind of road, ascending and descending hills 
and mountains, it is my opinion after long experi- 
ence that strong, heavy horses are more trustworthy 
and useful, do their work with less fatigue, and do 
it better. My black horses, Ned and Jack, now 
grown old and living in almost inglorious idleness, 
weigh twelve hundred and fifty each. I have a 
pair of grays that weigh short twelve hundred each. 
My carriage with my regular travel load weighs a 
trifle under fourteen hundred. Either pair of horses 
will take us along on roads up hill and down at an 
average gait of five miles to the hour. This is fast 
enough for one to drive who travels to see every- 



HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL 



91 



thing that is to be seen on both sides of the road. 
It may happen, after a day of loitering along, that I 
find myself towards evening eight or ten miles from 
my proposed resting-place. My horses can do that 
in an hour, and come in in good order, I seldom 
average over twenty-five miles a day. But, on occa- 
sion, I drive forty-five miles a day, without fatigue 
to these horses. Few light horses can be depended 
on for such little afternoon spurts, or such extra 
days, over rough or mountainous roads, on a jour- 
ney of four or five hundred miles, with three-fourths 
of a ton behind them. 

A comfortable carriage, comfortable for both 
horses and travellers, is a very rare object in our 
day. The tendency of late years has been to build 
carriages to be looked at, or to show off the persons 
and dresses of the occupants. With this has grown 
the fashion of building carriages with narrow box 
seats, into which two persons can crowd side by 
side only by wedging as they take their seats. 

In carriage travel the primary considerations for 
the vehicle are strength and roominess. Don't save 
a hundred or two pounds of weight at the expense 
of strength. Get horses that will draw your load, 
and don't sacrifice safety and sureness. By sure- 
ness, I mean this : that a break-down in a lonesome 
road, miles from a blacksmith, is an unpleasant ac- 
cident. 

Breadth of beam is what you need to give room. 



192 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

Your running-gear must be of the ordinary gauge 
in use in the country you travel in, and your car- 
riage-box as wide as possible on that gear. The 
seats should be so wide that two persons can sit on 
them with room between them for a book, or a 
small bag, or any little traps. The front and back 
seat should be on a level. I generally travel with 
three in the carriage, one on the back seat, myself 
and coachman on the front seat. This leaves am- 
ple room on the back seat and bottom for books, 
maps, flowers that we gather, wraps, and the small 
impedimenta of travel -, while a rack behind the car- 
riage holds the trunks, which are not heavy, but 
with their leverage power balance the weight of two 
on the front seat and make even springs. It is well 
that the carriage top be an ordinary extension top, 
reaching forward over the front seat, which can be 
thrown completely back and lie on the baggage. In 
soft October days there is vast delight in riding in 
the sunshine. 

To those who travel for the enjoyments which we 
desire, it is objectionable to have a carriage door. 
The side should present no impediment to frequent 
stepping out and in, and the footsteps should be 
broad and roughened. You see a flower, a bunch 
of moss, a stone ; innumerable objects along the 
road-side attract your eye ; and you get out scores 
of times and get in again with your treasure. As 
the day passes you accumulate a heap of such 



HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL 1 93 

things that you have examined and talked about 
after gathering. Towards evening, as you approach 
your resting-place, out they go on the road-side. 
Two-thirds of the pleasure and profit of this travel 
is in thus getting out of the carriage, sometimes for 
only an instant. 

Going up or down hill I often stop, for the reason 
that I have a brake. I italicize the word because it 
is so absolutely essential to the comfort and safety 
of both travellers and horses. It is marvellous that 
in ordinary hilly country so few persons have brakes 
on their pleasure carriages, buggies, or business 
wagons. One can be easily attached to any vehicle 
by any blacksmith, and will add years to the healthy 
life of your horses. No trouble is more common 
with horses than lameness in the fore-legs or shoul- 
ders. This comes, in countless instances, from trot- 
ting downhill with a load behind. The horse is not 
free in action. If he were at perfect liberty he 
would go lightly, set his feet down with instinctive 
certainty and without pounding. But he has a load, 
pulling by traces on his fore-shoulders, jerking pulls, 
now following fast on him, now brought up sud- 
denly by a stone or a water-bar. No horse thus 
encumbered can trot downhill without constant 
danger of pounding his fore-feet heavily down, pro- 
ducing a strain in the shoulder, perhaps twisting 
his leg or ankle when his foot goes down on a 
stone, or somewhere where he does not mean to 



194 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

put it. So, too, the strain of holding back a heavy 
load, with the breeching around the thighs, pro- 
duces the same effects. Of course no one will be 
guilty of trying northern trav^el with a light harness 
and no breechings. 

I repeat, for the benefit of all the race of carriage 
horses, as well as for the benefit of those who own 
and value horses, that in a hilly country every buggy, 
wagon, and carriage should be provided with a brake. 
It is hardly necessary to add that for the pleasure- 
traveller, who wants to stop anywhere along the 
road-side, it is indispensable. In western Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hamp- 
shire, a steady uphill grade of two or three miles is 
a common feature of roads, and it is not uncommon 
to find a mountain pass where the road is uphill 
for six, eight, or ten miles. If one desires a glorious 
ride, let him drive from Westfield in Massachusetts 
to Norfolk in Connecticut, and learn how to ascend 
and descend hills for the sake of every variety of 
scenery. But if he try that country without strong 
horses, a stout carriage, and a safe brake, he will 
chance to come to grief, with no help in sight. 

Look well to the bolts which attach the pole and 
hauling -gear to your carriage. Many carriage- 
builders neglect this. A heavy carriage, with abun- 
dant iron -work, warranted strong, will often be 
found drawn by two small iron bolts in thin rings, 
both of which are daily wearing weaker. Reinforce 



HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL 1 95 

iron -work with straps. Iron is poor stuff to de- 
pend on ; " there's nothing Hke leather." Have a 
strong neck-yoke or strong hold-back on the end 
of your pole. A brake saves danger there, but 
you cannot be too safe. Don't forego safety for 
the sake of beauty. Travel to look, not to be 
looked at. 

Don't trust your horses to the attention of host- 
lers, but when you reach a resting-place, secure 
their comfort for the night before you secure 'your 
own. If you love your horses as I love mine, you 
will need no such advice. When you start in the 
morning take a thorough look over your harness 
and carriage, to see that all is right for the road. 
Talk a little while with the horses before you start, 
chat with them once in a while along the road, es- 
pecially if you happen to be walking uphill beside 
them or before them, and always make sure to 
speak with them when the day's work is done. 

Cleanliness prevails in north-country inns. In 
an experience of thousands of miles of travel along 
New England roads, during many years, my note- 
book records only three or four instances where I 
was compelled to write " not clean " of the inn in 
which I passed the night. Food is abundant ev- 
erywhere and of the best quality. Good bread, 
and milk, fresh eggs, fruits, vegetables, preserved or 
cooked fruits, cake made in great variety — these are 
found on every table. There has been in former 



196 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

years a universal idea that beefsteak was essential 
to a traveller's supper and breakfast. Country- 
killed beef, however good in flavor, is generally 
very tough and hard. The certainty of the ap- 
pearance of this tough beefsteak has led me to 
adopt the custom of saying when I enter an inn, 
" Don't give us any beef." I recommend the trav- 
eller by carriage to follow my example. I have 
never found in Europe or America finer mutton or 
lamb than is abundant with us all along our drives. 
You should carry your own tea and coffee. 

The roads are fairly good, but we notice, espe- 
cially in Vermont, a manifest deterioration from 
year to year in their character. They are growing 
poorer, and this is perhaps due to the fact that the 
towns are growing poorer. 

The whole system of road-making by town-tax 
is bad. It is not to be expected that a poor town, 
which happens to lie on a route of travel between 
two or more populous towns, should keep up first- 
class roads for the use of those who pay nothing 
towards them. Nor do people with whom road 
making and repairing is a matter of annual taxa- 
tion take any personal interest or have any per- 
sonal pride in their roads. The worst mud holes 
in roads are frequently in front of good farm- 
houses. It would take the farmer an hour, with 
his horses, to fill up such a hole and make a good 
road by his front door. But that would be doing 



HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL T97 

work which is the town's business to do, and he 
would get no pay for it ; so he lets it alone. If 
he is drawing a heavy load uphill he chocks his 
wheels with a stone to rest his horses, and drives 
on, leaving the stone in the road. To throw it out, 
and to throw out other stones left by other team- 
sters, would be doing town work, and he will not 
do that in his own town, much less in another 
town. 

Do you know what is meant by " working out the 
road-tax ?" Each man's proportion of work is as- 
sessed. He has so many days' work to pay. The 
times of working on roads are fixed by the town of- 
ficer. Carts, horses, ploughs, etc., are furnished on 
order, and allowed for at fixed rates. You have 
seen the deliberate slowness with which day-labor- 
ers on railways, or on contract work in city streets, 
perform their labor. These men are lively and 
swift compared with the country farmer when work- 
ing out his road-tax. The gravel-bed is perhaps a 
half-mile down the road. Four or five men with 
shovels load a cart there in three minutes, and hav- 
ing loaded it, sit down and smoke and chat a half- 
hour till it returns empty. Down on the roadway 
four or five men await the cart, smoking and chat- 
ting, dump and spread the dirt or gravel when it 
comes, taking three minutes for the job, and smoke 
and chat a half-hour till the cart comes asfain. If 
they planted and gathered crops as they make 



190 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

roads, they would starve. It is not because they 
are lazy or indolent. These are men of might in 
their own affairs. But they are working out the 
road -tax, and who ever heard that a man ought 
to work in payment of a tax as he works for 
himself ? 

It is rarely necessary to drive anywhere in Ver- 
mont or New Hampshire more than ten or fifteen 
miles to find a good inn. Whether going north, 
south, east, or west, it is usually practicable to ride 
pleasantly in the forenoon for two or three hours, 
stop at noon to feed the horses and get luncheon, 
which will be called dinner, drive again two, three, 
or four hours in the afternoon and strike a com- 
fortable inn for supper and night-lodging. Day's 
drives can thus be adjusted according to your 
pleasure. You will linger in pleasant places ; you 
will loiter along some roads ; you will change your 
preconceived route suddenly, at noon, or in the 
morning, or along the road. Sometimes you will 
drive only a few miles. At other times you may 
be induced to press your horses to their extreme 
ability in order to reach a desired resting - place. 
But I recommend you to regard your horses and 
do not give them hard days' works. Let them 
enjoy the travel as you enjoy it. You may have 
great confidence in the health and strength of your 
horses, but do not forget that for horses as for 
men, travelling, eating in various places, spending 



HINTS FOR CARRIAGE TRAVEL 



199 



nights in various stables, drinking varieties of wa- 
ter, subjected to various weather exposures, all this 
is very different from home life. Oats vary as much 
as bread varies. Hay is a very variable food. Men 
will assure you in October that they have only old 
oats, and sicken your horses by giving them grain 
threshed three weeks ago, unless you watch them ; 
and it is by no means easy to tell new oats from 
old. For comfort and enjoyment an average of 
twenty-five miles a day is quite enough for you or 
your horses. If you enjoy the country, with its in- 
numerable beauties, you will often be content with 
five miles, and constantly desire to remain just 
where you are. 

Finally, don't be in a hurry, and when you start 
out for the day's drive do not start with the deter- 
mination to go to a certain place. That is not 
what you are taking a carriage journey for. You 
may and will fix on a place as a probable end 
of your day, but don't go off in the morning with 
mind set on reaching there as the day's purpose. 
Loiter along ; stroll in the woods ; sit awhile on a 
rock by the side of a lake ; stop long on the hill- 
tops and take in the glory of American scenery. 
If you are an angler, your rod, unjointed but ready 
with line, leader, and flies, lies fore-and-aft on your 
carriage seats, and many a brook or pond or lake, 
in the spring-time, will pay you for a cast. In the 
autumn your gun lies ready, and partridges crossing 



2 00 ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS 

the road will tempt you often out of your carriage. 
\'ou will not get many, but you will have all the 
excitement, and may now and then carry your sup- 
per or breakfast in with you. 



THE END 



rf^ 



^ ^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 042 619 2 



